A Contrastive Study On Chinese And English Commercial Advertisement

With the material resources enriching, the producers have an aim to propaganda their products, as a result, advertisement penetrates in every corner in our life, especially in the commercial society, which serves as a bridge between the producers and the consumers. Particularly after the globalization of the economy and China's entry into WTO, the effect of advertisement becomes even more obvious than ever before. Thus, a contrastive analysis on the Chinese and English advertisement is of great significance. Though many scholars have made analysis and study on the advertisement, however, most of the works are from the perspective of media study, anthropology, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, etc, and there is no study based on the Adaptation Theory.This thesis makes a contrastive analysis from a new perspective, and the research objects in the thesis are the advertisement of daily used commodities that have a close relationship with our lives, but not the advertisement of luxurious products, such as famous wine and tobaccos, which have been studied by many scholars. The thesis would help the consumers improve the ability of understanding advertisement and language of advertisement. The data used in the thesis is taken from books, TV, Internet and magazines, which can be divided into two groups: domestic group and foreign group. All the data is chosen at random which would ensure the objectiveness of the analysis. It is put forward that the process of using language is also a process of making continuous linguistic choices, consciously or unconsciously. Advertisement, as one form of language, also contains the language choice and adaptation. The author makes a contrastive analysis on a large amount of Chinese and English advertisement based on the Adaptation Theory, through which, she wants to have a surface understanding of the adaptative use of Chinese and English advertisement through various kinds of pragmatic strategies and adaptation strategies. For instance, how the Chinese and English advertisement adapt to the structural objects, namely, the phonetic, lexical and syntactic level of both language, and how the Chinese and English advertisement adapt to the consumers' mental, social arid physical world respectively. Through the contrastive analysis under the guidance of the Adaptation Theory, the author believes that the thesis has meaning, both theoretical and practical, in addition, she wants to give some implications on the Chinese and English advertisement making. In the globalization, the Chinese advertisement need adapt to the linguistic patterns and communicative world of foreigners in order to get a high market share in the world. So do the advertisement of foreign products with an aim to avoid the pragmatic failure.