Context Analysis And Optimal Relevance In Advertising Puns

As an effective vehicle for spreading information, advertising is becoming more and more important in this information age. To impress and attract the consumers in the limited space and time, the advertisers pay more attention to the linguistic devices to promote sales, in which pun is one of the most important. Because of its peculiar rhetorical and pragmatic effects, pun is widely applied in advertisements to promote sales. Relevance theory is a cognitive pragmatic theory which explores how people communicate. Based on relevance theory, the dissertation employs examples to analyze how the audience acquires optimal relevance through the contextual assumption selection in the advertising puns in English and Chinese commercial advertisements.Relevance Theory suggests that communication is an ostensive-inferential process, a cognitive process for the audience to identify the communicator's intention. Advertising is a special act of communication and the audience's task is to acquire optimal relevance through the stimuli and contextual assumptions. So as an advertiser, he does not only make the audience pay processing effort but also guarantees them certain contextual effects, or the ad will fail to arrive at its propagating and promoting goals. The best context must be selected to make the addressee accept the information conveyed by the advertisement.This dissertation introduces the major contents of relevance theory in order to provide background knowledge to readers. It then discusses the pragmatic features of advertising pun and the features and functions of context within it. Finally, based on relevance theory, the dissertation analyzes the cognitive process of interpreting advertising pun, in particular, the optimal relevance from context selection in terms of cognition, linguistics, situation, and culture.Relevance theory offers a more convincing explanation of the basic question of how communication between an advertiser and audience is achieved. In the course of achieving the optimal relevance, the consumers will eliminate the surface structure meaning and grasp the advertisers'intended intention.