On The Dynamics Between Words And Pictures

With reference to Sperber and Wilson's(1995) Relevance Theory, the present study analyzes how the audience of the printed pictorial advertisement recovers the informative intention of the advertiser and acquires optimal relevance of the ad through the ostensive stimuli employed by the advertiser in this unique form of communication. Advertising is a typical situation in which the communicator is not trustworthy and the audience is not trusting. It is mutually manifest to the interlocutors that the purpose of the advertiser is to persuade the audience to buy. In order to achieve the purpose, the advertiser employs various strategies and the pictorial advertisement is chosen as the best embodiment of these strategies. In pictorial advertising, in addition to the headline, the advertiser can also employ the illustration to fulfill his/her informative intention and communicative intention. Designed in the targeted audience's perspective, the headline and the illustration compensate each other in catching the audience's attention and guiding them to yield the optimal relevance and recover the intended interpretation of the ads. These two processes are an integrated whole under the tacit guidance of the principle of relevance. Within this paper, thirteen pictorial advertisements are selected to illustrate the ostensive-inferential process from three strategies: the garden path strategy, the covert communication in ad and the resonance strategy. The aim of this paper is threefold: 1) this study tries to examine the applicability of relevance theory to the analysis of printed pictorial ad and in this way makes its little contribution to the view that the relevance theory is of great importance for the study of communication in a broad sense; 2) to explore and reassess the relation between the linguistic message and the pictorial component within the pictorial ads; 3) to show the advertisers the effectiveness of these strategies and the product categories which they are applicable to.The applicability of a theory is one of the factors determining its failure or success. The findings of this study show that under the tacit guidance of the principle of relevance, the ostensive stimuli well-conceived by the advertiser are effective in attracting the audiences' attention and in guiding them to yield the intended optimal relevance of the advertisement, and therefore, the findings indicate that relevance theory is applicable in explaining the...