A Relevance-Theoretic Interpretation Of The Intertextuality In Advertising

In contemporary society, advertising is everywhere. Therefore, more and more importance is attached to the research of advertising. 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. In terms of the research of advertising language, there are also many achievements in the field of social linguistics, psycholinguistics, communicative linguistics and cultural linguistics. However, one common phenomenon in advertising has not aroused people's enough attention. That is intertextuality in advertising discourse. The researches mentioned above have had few concerns with the intertextual factors.Actually, intertextuality has been an important subject in the field of literature study. The research of intertextuality has gone a long way and achieved a lot in the field of literary criticism as well as in the study of translation. And nowadays intertextuality as a discourse phenomenon is attracting more attention in the field of applied linguistics, especially in critical discourse analysis. For example, it is applied to analyzing various direct and indirect speeches in news discourse. As a mater of fact, intertextuality is also an important component of an advertising discourse, especially in respect of making communication with the target audience of the advertising. And these researches on intertextuality, which have noticed the phenomenon of intertextuality in advertising, only make emphasis on the forms or functions of intertextuality, but not make a specific analysis of how intertextuality works in advertising, neither explain the theoretical basis of intertextuality being used in advertising.The main purpose of this thesis is to analyze the intertextuality in written advertising within the framework of relevant theory and to explain how intertextuality makes communication occur between the advertiser and the audience and manages to introduce the product.The results of the study show that intertextuality in the advertising discourses plays an important role in fulfilling the advertisements'strategies. The various forms of intertextuality in advertising function as the ostensive stimuli that attract the audience's attention on the one hand and help the audience proceed towards optimal relevance on the other hand. It is these contexts that trigger the audience's inferential process. It is in the audience's inferential process associated with the intertextual contexts that the advertiser's communicative intention is fulfilled. And it is the process of the acquirement of optimal relevance that makes the advertising discourse retain the audience's attention.