Irony In Advertisements

The purpose of this paper is to explain and analyse the use of irony in advertising with a view to exploring the interest-arousing power of irony in advertisements. The study is based on Relevance Theory developed by and Sperber & Wilson.The whole paper consists of five parts: (1) Introduction. (2) Literature review (3) Relevance Theory by Sperber and Wilson. (4) Research methodology and analysis of cases of advertisements. (5) Conclusion.The first part deals with the purpose of research, motivation, theoretical foundation, research methodology and the outline of the whole thesis. In the second part a literature review gives some insight into traditional semantic definition of irony, standard definition of irony, logical refinement of irony definition and Grice's pragmatic refinement of the description of irony. Base on the definitions and refined descriptions of irony, the paper is trying to make explorations into understanding of irony in advertisements.In the third part Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory is introduced in order of "communication and Inference→Ostensive-inferential Communication→Relevance and Cognition", which combines the relevance of communicating and the cognition of message-receiving and thus carries more practical significance.The research methodology of this paper is case study, thus the fourth part is of most importance. Analysis of the cases is based on Sperber &Wilson's Relevance Theory and is divided into 5 steps including incongruities analysis, context analysis, mutuality analysis, questionnaire result diagram and cognitive effectiveness analysis. The analysis is largely qualitative while some quantitative analysis is employed as a complement. Theories and experiments are closely knitted in order to safeguard the effectiveness of analysis. In the fifth part, a conclusion of the whole thesis is made and suggestions for further studies are provided. Due to limitation of time and space, only 11 of the total 17 cases are seriously analysed. The cases are selected from some advertisement collection books and internet web pages. The sources of the 6 cases unanalysed in this paper are also noted in Appendix Ⅰ. The questionnaire is conducted randomly among 31 shoppers in a department store in Beijing. The interviewees are asked how interested they are in the advertisements selected in this thesis. The result of the questionnaire is shown by the figures in the table in Appendix Ⅱ. The original questionnaire form is shown in Appendix Ⅲ.The size of the samples has just come up to the standard statistical requirement, thus it is impossible to draw a conclusion that is universally effective. All in all, the aim of the paper is to prove by virtue of case analysis that irony employed in some advertisements can really arouse readers' interest.