Analysis Of Chinese TV Advertising Language From Adaptation Theory Perspective

The advertisement language is not just a slogan;it is highly concentrated in the core value of the brand and directly touches the hearts of consumers.The ultimate purpose of advertising is to persuade and to sell products,so advertisers choose different language strategies to meet the needs of their potential consumers.The corpora are Chinese TV commercial advertisements from domestic mainstream TV channels.By adopting the qualitative method,this thesis analyzes the advertising corpora based on the Adaptation Theory by Verschueren(2000)to explain how the advertisers choose the language strategy and eventually manage to persuade their potential consumers to accept and buy the products.According to the age and gender differences,the potential consumer groups are divided into four categories: children,the senior,men and women.The research finds that in order to meet the needs of different consumer groups,the language strategies chosen by advertisers are obviously different.Each advertisement targeted to different groups has prominent features so as to narrow the distance between products and the consumers and thus stimulates their desire to purchase.To children consumers,advertisers mainly take their language competence and body growth into consideration.Reduplication words and words related to healthy growth are prominently chosen.To the senior consumers,advertisers mainly take their health care into consideration.So for language-internal reasons,advertisers choose to use long and repeated discourse together with simple and neat sentence in order to conform to the senior's buying characteristics and memory ability.To men consumers,words on male self-identification and achievement oriented words are prominent features in men-targeted advertisement language in order to suit to their male social responsibility and gender ideology.While to women consumers,vague words and words on female image are prominent in order to match to their family responsibility and gender characteristics.The present study intends to broaden the application of Adaptation Theory and help the consumers to better understand the commercial advertisements.It hopes to provide a reference for the future research.