Adaptation In Communicative Context Of Advertising Discourse

With the development of economy in China, the advertising industry has beenflourishing with full speed. So the advertising language has penetrated into human daily lifeand gradually become a unique style. As language records information of the society, theadvertising language to some extent also reflects social aspects like culture, value andpsychology. And these non-linguistic factors will be presented in context. Meanwhile, thestudies of modern linguistics require more consideration from multi-level and stress the socialfunction and cultural diversity. It is believed that linguistic studies should combine languageusers with the specific context in a dynamic state. Though much attention from linguisticaspect has been paid to advertising, the systematic study of non-linguistic context ofadvertising discourse is still limited. In order to perfect the research on this phenomenon, thethesis is to adopt Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory to explore the dynamic process ofadaptability in advertising context. Adaptation Theory emphasizes the interaction ofcommunicators and puts the expresser and the interpreter in the central position of context tohighlight communication in discourse. It sheds a new light and provides a powerfulexplanation for this phenomenon. This thesis tends to make a contribution to contextual studyof advertising discourse in communicative dimension. It is expected that the study will beconductive to further research on advertising.This study adopts a qualitative method. The data in the thesis are mainly Chineseadvertisements collected from advertising books which cover famous and classical ads.Through a systematical analysis of communication in advertising discourse, it is hoped thatthe process of dynamic adaptation in advertising context will be presented, so as to enrichpragmatic research on advertising, to contribute to interpretation and effectiveness onadvertising communication, and to improve the advertisers’ linguistic strategies and arousetheir consciousness to concern social aspects.This thesis is divided into five chapters: Chapter1gives an introduction to the wholethesis, including the background, the rationale, the significance, the research questions, the objective and the method of data collection. Chapter2presents a literature review of thepresent study from stylistic, systemic-functional, semiotic and pragmatic approaches.Meanwhile, it gives a brief introduction to advertising and advertising discourse. Chapter3isthe theoretical framework. It puts forward a brief introduction to Adaptation Theory proposedby Verschueren, an introduction to the communicative context, and the communicativemechanism in advertising discourse. Chapter4mainly focuses on the analysis of adaptabilityin advertising discourse, which is organized in three aspects: adaptation to the mental world,adaptation to the social world, adaptation to the physical world. Chapter5is a conclusionafter the above analysis. The major findings, limitations and implications of this study will bepresented.