Adaptation To The Audience's Mental World In Advertising Language

This is an attemptive study on what the advertiser has done to adapt to the mental state of the audience in print advertising. Concerning this issue questions being explored include how the advertiser address certain aspects of the audience's mental states and how are his linguistic choices manifested. The study is an empirical one, mainly based on qualitative analysis of the data, which is in fact the pragmatic interpretation of the answer to the questions. As space is limited, the data under investigation are confined to Chinese printed advertisements directed towards female audiences. Supported by Verschueren's theory of linguistic adaptation, the author endeavors to construct a theoretical framework as to how advertising language works as linguistic communication and to analyze how adaptation regarding the audience's mental world takes place in advertising language. The analysis is conducted along the continuum of directness and indirectness from the three key notions in Adaptation Theory, viz variability, negotiability and adaptability. The advertiser's exploitation of the interplay between explicit and implicit meaning is thus revealed and elaborated. So are the two aspects of the audience's mental world the advertiser tries to adapt to, namely cognitive factors and emotive factors. Generally linguistic choices are manifested as direct and indirect appeals, the latter of which consists of explicit and implicit claims. Cognitive factors that are tuned into refer to the audience's way of perceiving and evaluating, while emotive factors, the audience's needs, attitudes and emotions. The general strategy throughout the communication is politeness, other strategies include masking the advertisement with advices, praising the product in terms of its superiority or improvement, imposing on the audience a new belief, using effective and forceful ways of expression, refraining from the position of addresser, taking the form of objective reporting, and promising to satisfy the audience's needs, etc. Drawing on a range of work in pragmatics, advertising and communication, this paper tends to make contribution to this particular communicative dimension of advertising language.