Analysis Of The Parody In Advertisements

With the development of society and modern technology, advertisements have penetrated every aspect of human life. The wording of advertisements is the main carrier for an advertiser to convey persuasive intentions, so the application of rhetoric has become an important vehicle in beautifying advertising discourse. As a kind of rhetoric, parody has been widely used in advertising. Parody is an intentional imitation of a conventional expression with a view to expressing new ideas. A fine parodying text not only reflects the advertisers'creative minds, elegant use of language and allusion to well-accepted sayings, but also helps the consumers to perceive, understand and memorize.Most of the previous research on parody mainly carries on its critical features or artistic usage in the literary works, but insufficient research focuses on its application in advertising. Supported by the Linguistic Adaptation Theory advanced by Verschueren, this thesis tries to analyze the use of parody in advertising from the pragmatic perspective, which aims to investigate whether the choice of parody in advertising discourse is a result of the adaptation to the communicative context ot not. It will offer a fresh look at this field.Both qualitative and quantitative methodologies are employed to analyze the cases of English and Chinese advertisements. Through analyzing, it demonstrates the use of parody in advertising is the process of making linguistic choice dynamically adapt to the consumers'physical world, mental world and social world. The parody in advertising language should be adapted to, including the temporal background and the spatial reference in the consumers'physical world; the cognitive and emotive elements in their mental world; and the social settings or institutions and culture in their social world. Both English and Chinese parodic advertising adapt to the three worlds from different degree. On the basis of a contrastive study between English and Chinese parodic advertising in the adaptation process, it takes a close look at the classifications and features of parodic advertising, which provides useful guidance for advertisers to create successful parodic advertising.The Linguistic Adaptation Theory provides a new insight into explaining the production of advertising language, which makes parody in advertising language better to appreciate. At the same time, this research may cast a new perspective for the study of parody theoretically and enrich the explanatory power of Linguistic Adaptation Theory. Beneficially, it will elicit some helpful suggestions for adding parody to advertisements and offer some guidance for consumers to appreciate it.