On The Writing Of Advertising Headlines From Relevance Theory

Advertising headline is the first attention-grabbing device for an advertisement. It plays the role of demonstrating the main content of the advertisement, getting attention, and sometimes even persuading and pushing the consumers to buy the advertised product. Attention-gaining and persuasion are the basic functions of advertising headlines. Although sales-generation is the final goal of every advertisement, advertising headline is crucial toward that end.Because of the significant importance an advertising headline has, many copywriters are trying hard to make a successful headline. David Ogilvy, a very famous advertiser, has concluded from his practice ten principles of how to write advertising headlines. He put forward that some linguistic devices like pun and metaphor should not be used in headline making. However, this is not completely true in reality. Indeed, many successful advertising headlines are attributed to these linguistic devices.The relevance theory focuses on the degree of relevance and two governing principles—cognitive principle and communicative principle, and proposes the conception of optimal relevance. It puts forward that any ostensive-inferential communication is supposed to be of optimal relevance. Advertising headline is also an ostensive-inferential communication process, and therefore the relevance theory can offer effective explanations for the communicative functions of advertising headlines. Following the theoretical study, this thesis elaborates and proves the pragmatic values of the relevance theory in advertising headlines by analyzing samples. The relevance theory will be employed as a measure to evaluate the advertising headlines. Meanwhile, on the basis of relevance theory, three principles to guide the headline making are put forward, which are relevance principle, humor principle and novelty principle. The specific applications of the three principles are analyzed in the case study form.