A Probe Into Linguistic And Cultural Features Of Advertising English And Relevant Translation Approaches

Advertising has become a popular subject of study, approached from a wide range of disciplines, such as anthropology, sociology, linguistics, literary criticism, and media studies. Study of advertising English has been proceeding from a variety of perspectives, with the features of advertising English commonly as a focus. Based upon a host of data related to advertising, especially advertising English, this paper explores the main features of advertising English in terms of three aspects: lexicon level, syntax level and figures of rhetoric. Particular emphasis is placed on figures of rhetoric in advertising language. Based on the examination of the linguistic features of advertising English, this thesis also probes into relevant approaches to advertising English translation.The lexicon choices are closely related to the style of the text, just as stated by Jonathan Swift that"proper words in proper places make the true definition of a style". The Fowler Brothers (1908) mentioned the five principles of lexicon choices in The King's English: using similar words to replace farfetched words, concrete words to abstract words, single word to multiple words, simple words to long words and Anglo-Saxon words to Latin words. Based upon the above, the author explores the lexicon features of advertising English in terms of oral words, coinage, borrowed words, compound words, abbreviations, verbs, adjectives and use of weasel words.In any type of communication, including that of advertising, discourse serves as a context, affecting syntactic and lexical level interpretation, tipping the interpretation of what would otherwise be ambiguous in a certain way. Different styles and discourses require different sentence patterns. This thesis deals with the syntactic features of advertising English from various perspectives, which are characterized by simple sentence, imperative sentence, interrogative sentence, ellipsis, disjunctive clause and you-attitude.It is known that another key role in advertising is played by the rhetorical figure, which can be defined as an artful deviation in the form taken by a statement. Since antiquity dozens of figures have been catalogued, ranging from the familiar (rhyme, pun) to the obscure (antimetabole). Despite the frequent appearance of rhetorical figures in print advertisements, their incorporation into advertising theory and research has been minimal. The present paper develops a framework for classifying rhetorical figures that distinguishes between figurative and non-figurative texts, between two types of figures (schemes and tropes), and among four rhetorical operations that underlie individual figures (repetition, reversal, substitution, destabilization). The section involved concludes by considering the theoretical import of the proposed framework for future research on rhetorical structure in advertising. The principal purpose of this endeavor is to contribute a richer and more systematic conceptual understanding of rhetorical structure in advertising English. In contrast to...