Deviation In English Advertising And Its Interpretations

Advertising is playing a more and more important role in modern society. Advertising of various forms can be seen at any time and in any place. Many researches have been carried out in this field among which the study of advertising language has attracted particular attention from linguists.As a way to promote the sales of products, advertisers must abide by the AIM principle, i.e. to grab readers' attention, arouse their interest and construct their memory to achieve the final goal of triggering their action. Advertisers try their best to make their ads stand out, which is the first step to create effective advertising. The application of the technique of deviation in advertising is one way.Deviation is a language phenomenon which is commonly used by western linguists to analyze poetic language. It refers to the special/unusual expression that deviates from norm and it appears in various forms such as deviation of phonology, grammar and semantics. Some Chinese scholars have adapted the theory of deviation to analyze both Chinese and English advertising, though superficially and unsystematically. So this paper tries to give a detailed discussion of various deviations in advertising with up-to-date English ads and also to interpret this phenomenon with relevant theories.This paper will choose around 400 ads from altogether 12 issues of two magazines as studied samples to analyze deviation of phonology, graphology, lexicon, bilingualism, grammar, semantics, register and discourse in advertising respectively. From this study, we find deviation of various forms is really widely used in English advertising and is an effective way to attract readers' attention.However, the use of deviation in advertising is not at random. It must achieve some purposes. Thus this paper tries to explain this phenomenon from relevant aspects so that we can have a deeper understanding of deviation in advertising. In the aspect of linguistics, deviation of adverting is for the purpose of foregrounding (making strange). While in that of pragmatics, the relevance theory and economy principle could well interpret the phenomenon of deviation. This paper also gives some interpretations from psychological and aesthetical aspects. In brief, deviation in advertising is mainly to attract readers' attention.We hope this paper will provide advertisers with better knowledge of deviation in advertising so as to prepare them for the production of more successful advertisements and also attract more scholars' attention on the comprehensive study of the issue.