A Study Of Iconicity In Advertising Language

As one of the most important elements of advertising, advertising language can be said to be the soul of advertising. Many scholars have made great contributions to this research from perspectives of semiotic approach, systematic-functional approach, pragmatic approach, and stylistic approach, etc. Based on these researches, this thesis attempts to investigate into advertising language in light of the theory of cognitive linguistics on iconicity.Ranking as one of the important theories in cognitive linguistics, theory of language iconicity has been under hot discussion both at home and abroad. Iconicity refers to the iconic relation between linguistic form and the meaning it conveys. It is not only pervasive in ordinary language, but also in literature and all kinds of verbal discourse, including advertising. The difference between iconicity employed in ordinary language and in verbal arts lies in that iconicity is employed unconsciousnessly in ordinary language, while in advertising language, it is employed purposefully. Iconicity manifests itself at several dimensions of advertising language:phonology, graphology, syntactic structure and text.Iconicity can be divided into three subtypes:imagic iconicity, diagrammatic iconicity and metaphoric iconicity. In this thesis, we will restrict our study to imagic iconicity and diagrammatic iconicity.Based on the citation of abundant data, this thesis attempts to present a comparatively systematic study of iconicity from two subtypes of iconicity:imagic iconicity (from the angles of iconicity principles of sound and graphology) and diagrammatic iconicity (from the angles of iconicity principles of markedness, quantity and symmetry) through Chinese and English advertising language. These will verify that the enhancement of the sales of target product can be achieved through employment of iconicity in advertising language.