| Today, more than ever, if advertising is not relevant, it has no purpose. If it is not original, it will attract no attention. If it does not strike with impact, it will make no lasting impression. The challenges drive advertiser to consider how he could make the advertising communication more effective. Also he should consider how to budget economy of means against results, for he is buying his way to the public's attention. While as a specific type of communication, advertising is the interaction of elements: participants, language, music, pictures, paralanguage, situation, etc. When we take all these problems into consideration, we should find a convincing theory which could help us explore the subject. The relevance theory proposed by Sperber & Wilson is such one. As a dynamic and cognitive theory of pragmatics, it could answer all these specific phenomena in advertising. The main aim of pragmatic theory is to explain how successful communication is possible and in particular how utterances are understood.The present thesis concerns the language of advertising, the main medium of advertising communication. The thesis can be mainly divided into three parts, introduction, seven chapters and conclusion.The first part includes chapter one and chapter two. In chapter one A Review of Previous Approaches to Ad Language, several approaches to the language of advertising have been assessed, including semiotic approach, stylistic approach, discourse approach and pragmatic analysis. Each has its own drawbacks. In contrast, Sperber & Wilson' relevance theory offers a more convincing explanation for the basic questions of how communication between an advertiser and audience is achieved. We can find the details in Chapter one. In chapter two A Framework for an Account of AD Language, first we will review some important notions in relevance theory. We canfind the general statements of the fundamental theories, such as two principles of relevance, Presumption of optimal relevance, relevance -theoretic comprehension procedure. The further study of advertising language is based on these theories.Chapter three to chapter seven can be considered as the main part of this thesis. It deals with the various linguistic phenomena of advertising language. In chapter three Advertising as Communication, we will talk about S&W's model of communication: ostensive-inferential communication. Then we will discuss the concept of ostension and inference. In fact, inferential communication and ostension are one and the same process, but seen from two different points of view. Ostension in advertising tells us why advertiser tends to make use of novel style of language. According the classification of intention (informative intention and communicative intention), communication can be classified into two types: overt communication and covert communication. Both are equally important strategic devices. Especially the application of covert communication in advertisement can avoid negative social reactions that an advertisement may arouse.Chapter four Proposition Expressed in Advertising Language is an ambitious attempt to deal with the problem of proposition expressed in advertisements. This topic has been overlooked in the previous studies. There are three processes of getting prepositional forms full. They arereference assignment, disambiguation and enrichment. These subtasks involved in the recovery of the proposition expressed play a very important role in advertising analysis. The concept of enrichment overthrows the Gricean view that what is implied is implicatures. In fact, there exists higher level of explicatures, which convey more than what is said. However, as we have seen, the interpretation of an advertisement is not restricted to the identification of the preposition expressed. In chapter five Metaphor inAdvertising Language, we will go further to discuss the relationship between the prepositional form of an advertisement and the thought that an advertiser intends to convey. Sperber & Wilson (1995) argue...
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