A Study Of Ambiguity In English Advertising Language: From The Perspective Of Contextual Adaptation Theory

With the development of the society and economy, advertising has become an indispensable part of our life. Accordingly, many relevant studies have been made by the researchers such as linguists, logicians, philosophers and psychologists from various perspectives and remarkable accomplishments have been made. As one of the frequently used advertising strategies, ambiguity, if employed carefully and properly, can produce many unexpected effects. In addition, advertising space is limited and costly. By means of ambiguity, the advertiser can save space and cost since it can express two meanings or even more with one word or one sentence.Verschueren, who puts forward Adaptation Theory, assumes that language use is a continuous making of linguistic choices and language has three properties: variability, negotiability and adaptability; and adaptation is bidirectional:language user makes choices in accordance with context; context adapts to the result of choice-making in language. Based on Contextual Adaptation Theory, this thesis is mainly concerned with how the ambiguous advertisement is dynamically adapted to communicative context and the linguistic context with a qualitative approach by analyzing forty ambiguous advertisements from a variety of sources such as magazines, newspapers, internet, etc. And the adaptations of ambiguity in this thesis are analyzed from the perspective of communicative context including mental world, social world and physical world, as well as from the perspective of linguistic context, which involves phonology, word and structure. Through a detailed analysis, this paper manages to verify the general applicability of Verschueren's Contextual Adaptation Theory can be used to conduct the study of ambiguous advertising language. Besides, the adaptive process of ambiguous advertisement is for both advertisers and consumers:the production of ambiguous English advertising language is the process of advertisers'making linguistic choices to dynamically adapting to the consumers' communicative context and linguistic context; and the interpretation of ambiguous English advertising language is the process of interactive adaptation between the ambiguous advertising language and the audiences'communicative context and linguistic context.Obviously, casting new insight into explaining the production and interpretation of ambiguous English advertising language, this work broadens the research scope of Contextual Adaptation Theory, which may shed light on the use and understanding of ambiguity in the English advertisement.