An Analysis Of The Presentations Of Cultural Values In Advertising Language

With the development of economy and social culture, advertisement has become an important and inseparable part of people' s daily life. It has penetrated into every corner of our life, as its transmitting media exist in many forms: newspapers, magazines, TVs, radios and Internet. As a product of society, advertisement transfers not only commercial information but also cultural information. Advertisers often consider the psychological and cultural needs of consumers to promote the sale of products. And cultural value is a powerful force shaping consumers' motivations, life-styles and product choices. Hence, there are cultural values in advertisement more or less.Cultural and commercial information merge with each other in advertising language, and cultural values are contained in various ways in advertisements. Thus, the study of the cultural values of ads goes on with two levels. On the first level, scholars discuss if advertisements contain certain cultural values and study this problem with comparison and quantification. They have made obvious achievements. On the second level, the research is about how does advertising language presents the cultural values, which is based on the first level.Speaking of the study on the second level, it is rarely mentioned. The thesis analyzes and discusses the presentations of cultural values in ads in terms of pragmatics and rhetoric. At the same time, it discusses how the cultural values in advertisements influence consumers' psychology and strengthen their consuming desire.The thesis includes five parts. The first part outlines the relationship between advertisements and cultural values, and reviews the findings by former scholars. In the end, the theme and structure of the thesis are put forward.The second part is the theoretical background. With the ISA by Searle, the CP by Grice and the RT by D. Sperber and D.Wilson as the bases, the explicit presentation and implicit presentation of cultural values in advertising language will be put forward.The ISA by Searle, the CP by Grice and the RT offer theoretical evidence for the author to analyze the indirectness of general information in advertising language. Both the ISA and the CP contain limitations in theory. But the application of the RT further develops the analysis of cultural values in ads.The third part analyzes the explicit presentation of cultural values in advertising language. It means that the cultural values in advertising language are shown by words and sentence structure in order to make consumers clear about the deep meaning?the cultural values ?after penetrating its literary meaning. The directness is embodied with the literary meaning and the rhetoric.The fourth part continues to research the implicit presentation of cultural values in advertising language from three aspects: the dynamic context, static context and rhetoric. The implicit means that the ad maker conveys certain cultural values in advertising language according to the mutual contextual beliefs or by some rhetoric devices that used when he / she violates certain maxims of the CP.The last part is the conclusion. It concludes that as a communicative method, advertisement conveys more meanings than persuading the consumers to buy the product. By means of pragmatic principles the ad maker tries to make the ads contain more information including cultural values. It can be seen cultural values are the most important factors. With these cultural values, the ads maker' s eventual purpose is clear, that is to give the consumers deep and far-reaching impression so as to realize the basic goal. The author analyzed ads and put forward the mainpattern guided by the pragmatic and rhetoric theories in this paper. And summarizes the functions of Speech Act Theory, the abidance and violation of the Cooperative Principle and the Theory of Relevance in the study of this topic. And the importance of mutual application and complementariness of these theories has been indicated.