A Comparison Of Language Deviation In English Advertisements Written By Americans And By Chinese

Language deviation is a linguistic device of purposeful violation of grammatical rules and pragmatic regulations in language communication. The functions of applying language deviation in literature creation can be summed up as strengthening mood, accentuating a particular part of writing, attracting readers'attention, and pursuing aesthetic value. Advertisement writing mainly aims at drawing the consumers'attention and emphasizing the excellent quality of the commodities, so it is not a surprise to see that there is a large quantity of deviated language items in advertisement scripts. Although some Chinese and American language researchers have carried out relevant study on language deviation in Chinese advertisements and in American advertisements respectively, little work has been done to explore the stylistic features of English advertisements written by Chinese. The thesis is constructed on Leech's classification of language deviation, with 120 English versioned advertisements from American and Chinese newspapers and magazines as data. It examines all the language deviation devices on lexical level, grammatical level, phonological level, graphological level, semantic level and register level employed by Chinese and Americans in their advertisement writing, and compares the frequencies of language deviation in the American advertisements and in the English advertisements written by Chinese. The independent t-test is used to verify whether there exists a significant statistic difference between the use of language deviation in American advertisements and in the English advertisements by Chinese. Through exploration and comparison, we find language deviation appears much more frequently in American advertisements than in English advertisements written by Chinese. Americans are very flexible in creating advertisement language, and they have very various ways to achieve language deviation, thus making their creation easily appeal to readers and leave deep impression on them. Chinese also employ language deviation in writing English advertisements, and some of their deviated language items are very creative and novel, but comparatively speaking, their skills of using deviation are still immature. Digging into the reasons why Chinese are not so skillful as Americans in writing English advertisements, we conclude that several factors contribute to the differences of language deviation in English advertisements by Chinese and by Americans, namely different development of advertisement industry, different economic level, different culture background, different public education level and China's poor vocational training. The findings of the thesis provide readers with some clues to understand the linguistic deviation in the China's English advertisement scripts and some suggestions on how to write the successful international advertisements.