A Pragmatic Analysis Of Advertising Texts

In modern society, advertising has been playing a more and more important role in our life. Advertising language is a language variety with its distinctive styles and strong persuasive intentions. However, advertisements do not reveal their persuasive force on the surface of language, but hide the effects behind some apparently innocent wordings. In fact, in order to use language effectively and strategically, advertisers may resort to different rhetorical devices, such as repetition, pun, parallelism, personification, metaphor and so on. This thesis will mainly analyze pun and metaphor in advertising from the perspective of pragmatics.In the field of pragmatics, Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory provide us with new perspectives to understand puns and metaphors. Sperber and Wilson propose Ostensive-Inferential Model of communication. They define this model as follows: The communicator produces a stimulus which makes it mutually manifest to communicator and audience that the communicator intends, by means of this stimulus, to make manifest or more manifest to the audience a set of assumptions. They claim that relevance is crucial to human communication and propose the following definition: An assumption is relevant in a context if and only if it has some contextual effect in that context. They also assume that humans have intuitions of relevance and thus one fundamental fact of human cognition is that they automatically aim at only relevant information and turn their attention to what seems most relevant to them.Basing on Sperber and Wilson's theory, two rhetorical devices of puns and metaphors are analyzed in the thesis. Puns are classified into five groups: homonymic puns, semantic puns, grammatical puns, idiomatic puns and brand puns. Metaphors are divided into standard and creative metaphors. For standard metaphors are losing then-metaphorical significance as a result of their frequent use in everyday life and hence are often avoided by advertisers, the thesis will focus on creative metaphors. By employing puns and metaphors, the advertisement can sustain the audience's attention and create a surprising or even sensational effect.