The Contrastive Analysis Of English And Chinese Analogy Advertisings From The Perspective Of Memetic Theory

With the rapid development of commodity economy and the wider internationalcommunication, entering in the21stcentury, there are more and more Chinese versionadvertisings of foreign imported products and English version advertisings of Chineseexported products. As a bridge connecting consumers and products, the advertising isplaying an ever more important role in sales. People compare advertisings to the angelof information transmission, catalyst for promotions, introduction letter of theenterprise and stepping-stone of the products. Some people even think that in thefuture, without advertising there would be no product, without advertising there wouldbe no benefit, without advertising, the enterprise would be unable to go ahead. In thecase that the importance of advertising is widely accepted, how to make theadvertising stand out from other similar ones is gradually becoming the highlyfocused issue. This problem also attracts the author’s attention and interest. Havingmade a long time observation, the author finds that there are some common featuresbetween English and Chinese advertisings. For example, by changing thepronunciation of the words, phrases or sentences which have appeared in theadvertising or are familiar to the customers, the designers integrate the information ofthe product, including name or characteristic into the advertising. Such artfulconnection can make a rhetoric effect of pun because they use the ready-madestructure of the famous idioms, proverbs, poems and habitual collocation of words tostrike a chord among the customers as well as promoting the product. Whether theyemploy the similar pronunciation or the well-known structure, such advertisings canmake customers have a feeling of familiarity as well as something special. In themodern world of fast-paced lifestyle, people are time addicts and they are easy to beattracted deeply by such advertisings which are both well-known and little-known.This has become a very remarkable language phenomenon.Foreign language researchers both in China and overseas have carried out manystudies on advertising language. Early work focuses on the field of translation,rhetoric, pragmatics, discourse, stylistics and culture, with functional equivalence theory, teleology, relevance theory, foreignization and domestication theory, speechact theory, and linguistic adaptation theory as its theoretical basis.（Liao Guirong,2008） With the development of memetics, a new theory from biology is widelyspread and used in social science. More and more foreign language researches arecombining with the memetic theory. While most of the advertising languageresearches done from the memetic perspective are concentrated on the research ofone certain product classified by product category, there are not enough broaderstudies which are classified by the advertising design approach, and the comparativeanalysis between English and Chinese advertising language on that basis are muchless, too. The author is inspired by He Ziran’s Language Meme and its RhetoricalEffect in2008and collectively refers to such English and Chinese advertisings asanalogy advertisings---that are imitating or applying the pronounciation or structureof words, phrases or sentences which have already appeared before or are familiarwith the customers, such English or Chinese advertisings that are created from theview of analogy transmission can be defined as analogy advertisings. Therefore thepresent thesis focuses on following questions for research and discussion:(1) Fromthe memetic perspective, why do the English and Chinese analogy advertisings getso good effect?(2) What are the differences between English and Chinese analogyadvertisings? What accounts for the differences?The present thesis is conducted based on memetic theory, which shed new lightin linguistics field, especially the sociolinguistics field. The memetic theory is anewly developed theory aiming to explicate the evolutionary mechanisms of culturebased on Darwin’s biology evolutionary theory and it tries to make sense of thenature of interconnectedness of everything as well as cultural heredity from thesynchronic and diachronic angles（.He Ziran,2005:30）The core concept in memeticsis the meme. The memetic theory holds that as a kind of cultural gene, the memesurvives by replication and transmission. Language is one of its carriers. From thememetic perspective, the language meme explain the law governing the spread oflanguage, furthermore, the language itself is a meme and it can spread at the level ofword, phrase, sentence and even the whole text.(He Ziran,2005:45) As a specialcultural transmission activity, advertising language has close links with the meme. (Chen Linxia,2006) If the advertising wants to grasp the customers’ attention, itslanguage must accord with the rule of meme development and meet the requirementof strong meme. So the unique feature on the design of English and Chinese analogyadvertisings has become the typical example of applying the meme theory.The author collects thirty analogy advertisings in English and Chineserespectively from three informative advertising books and then divides them intoanalogy on similar pronunciation and analogy on similar structure based on differentanalogy way. By giving a brief analysis, the author compares the differences andsimilarities between English and Chinese analogy advertisings and explores thecausing reasons. Thus this thesis takes comparative analysis and case study as thedominant study method while making qualitative investigation and inductive methodsubsidiary.The results of this study can be concluded as the following: Firstly, the reasonwhy English and Chinese analogy advertisings get so popular is because they applythe old but well-known pronunciation or structure, making full use of the strongmeme which exists in the customers’ mind, thus deepening the memory andattracting buyers. Secondly, the common features of the English and Chineseanalogy advertisings demonstrate themselves in two aspects: in advertising language,they are concise, novel, various in sentence pattern and figure of speech; inadvertising design, the number of analogy on pronunciation is larger than that ofanalogy on structure in advertising design. The differences can be drawn from twoaspects: in the analogy advertisings on similar pronunciation, the Chinese onesprefer to using the homonyms while the English ones like to create new words bychanging the spelling; in the analogy advertisings on similar structure, the Chineseones mainly use Chinese ancient poems or Chinese four-character idioms and go forgraceful melody while the English ones are good at using the famous idioms orproverbs which has the free-form.