A Tentative Study Of The Speech Acts Of Advertising English

Advertisement is something that we are all exposed to. Since China's entry into the WTO, it has increasingly impacted on our daily life. It not only provides us with a lot of information about things both at home and abroad, but also makes our life more rich and colorful.Advertisement is a special form of communication in a special communication situation. Language is the most important vehicle of communication. Though an advertisement includes many elements, yet language is the most important element of advertisement.Due to its unique functions and language features, advertising English, as a vehicle of English advertisement, has become one of the most interesting items studied by many linguists and researchers. Taking the lexical and syntactic features of advertisements as the starting point, they have made detailed investigations of advertising English, and have acquired a series of achievements, which have laid a good foundation for my research.However, the previous studies are not all satisfactory. Most of the researchers observed and analyzed advertising English from traditional perspectives of lexicology and syntax. Their academic theses and books concerning advertising English are mostly descriptive. Since the characteristics of advertising English are formed under the influence of linguistics, psychology, sociology, even marketing and aesthetics, therefore, it is far from satisfaction to describe its language facts without giving theoretical explanation to them. Prof. Cao Zhiyun says: "Up till the present moment, most of the researches with regard to advertising language are still limited to the appreciation of art, rhetorical comment and writing techniques, and few people explore its theoretical value" (曹 志耘, 1992: 2). Obviously he thinks such researches are lacking in theoretical and practical value, and he is right in making the remarks.This thesis has studied advertising English from the perspective ofspeech act. The speech act theory was proposed by J. L. Austin. Later, J. R. Searle developed this theory by providing felicity conditions for performing speech acts and the indirect speech act theory. With the theory of speech act, we have conducted thorough investigations of advertising English in three aspects. First, according to Searle, the minimal unit of linguistic communication is not the symbol, word or sentence, but rather the speech acts. Since advertisement is verbal, public, one-way communication and language is its important vehicle, then we hold that the speech acts are also the basic or minimal units of communication of advertising language. Secondly, in the speech act theory, Austin points out that three speech acts — locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act — are simultaneously performed when we are speaking. However, the illocutionary act is the focus of our interest and attention, because its force is identical with the intention of the adman and its selection is an important strategy of the adman. In this thesis we focus our attention on analyzing different kinds of illocutionary acts which are performed by admen and their felicity conditions in various advertisements, and by doing so, we seek to interpret some language facts that cannot be well interpreted from the previous perspectives. Thirdly, generally speaking, advertisement is intended to inform, but more often and more importantly, it is intended to persuade. The previous studies think the vast majority of advertisements persuade by means of crafty wording and the employment of rhetorical devices. However, this is merely a descriptive explanation. We think the indirect speech act theory can better explain the nature of this case. We believe, with the use of rhetorical devices like metaphor, simile, pun, personification, rhetorical question, irony and hyperbole etc, the message of the advertisement becomes more and more indirect. As is known to all, the indirectness of language is a kind of common linguistic phenomenon. When talking, people often do not say things bluntly;they use some indirect devices to express themselves. J. R. Searle defines indirectness of language orindirect illocutionary act as that "in which one illocutionary act is performed indirectly by way of performing another."(Searle, 1979: 31) G N. Leech has observed the relationship between indirectness and politeness, and he holds that the more indirect the utterance is, the more polite the act is. In this thesis, based on Searle's and Leech's theories, we have deeply explored the persuasion force of the figures of speech in advertising English.To sum up, in this thesis, viewing from the new angle, we have made an explanatory study of advertising English, rather than purely describing it. We hope that this new attempt will contribute to the explanation of the linguistic phenomena and linguistic features of advertising English, and help to search for the theoretical value of advertising English. We also hope that the study will enable the target audiences to understand and use advertisements correctly and that it will provide valuable data for ad-writers.