Application Of The Linguistic Adaptation Theory In Advertising Language

With the development of society and modern technology, advertisements have gone through great changes. Penetrating into every aspect of human life, advertisements have become one indispensable part of daily human life. Advertising language is the most important carrier of information in an advertisement, also the core of the advertising phenomenon. As an established practical style, advertising language now makes up of a considerable proportion of human language use. As a special kind of communication, advertising can be categorized into"persuasive"speech acts according to Speech Act Theory, which aims to convince interpreters into the action of consumption. Therefore, the examination of advertising language is the key to effectively creating and interpreting advertisements.Linguistic Adaptation Theory is proposed by Jef Verschueren, a Belgian linguist, in his systematic and comprehensive monograph Understanding Pragmatics. According to him, using language must consist of continuous making of linguistic choices, consciously or unconsciously, for language-internal and/or language-external reasons. The language-internal and the language-external reasons here refer to the structural factors and the contextual factors of the physical world, social world and mental world and so on. Making of linguistic choices is based on the inter-adaptation between the linguistic structures and contextual factors as well as communicative intentions. Adaptability is one of the most important properties in language use. The property of adaptability in language use can be described and explained in the process of communication along four dimensions. These four dimensions are the investigations of the contextual correlates of adaptability, the structural objects of adaptability, the dynamics of adaptability and the salience of the adaptation processes, i.e., the degrees of consciousness in language use. They almost cover all the aspects of a pragmatic analysis of any given language use. These four...