Idiomatic Advertising: Approached From Figure-ground Theory

The contemporary world sees the high-speed development of economy, with the naturalness for the oversupply of goods produced for the same purpose. In order to provide their commodities with the preponderance to seize hold of the market, manufacturers have to infuse consumers with the information of their products by letting them to know in time. Without any doubt, the flourish of the mass-media helps advertising becomes the most effective tool for conveying messages to audiences as early as possible. Qing Xiubai (1986) has mentioned that a piece of advertising needs to possess such qualities to measure up as an excellent one does, namely, selling power, memory value, attention value, and readability. Apart from these qualifications, in pursuing an ideal effect of advertising, advertising originators should try their utmost to make advertising more novel and special to find favor in people's eyes. The advertising with idioms, also called as idiomatic advertising, is hereby engendered. Such language phenomenon once became fashionable for a while from the 1990s in the mainland, but until recently, with its general trend that fades away, it is still in use after repeated prohibitions, which well proves that its value and potentiality are still right there. Based upon this point, this paper best attempts to dig out its real appearance from the cognitive perspective, since as a new approach, cognitive linguistics is the study of language based on our experience of the world and the way we perceive and conceptualize it and the study of the human language with consciousness knowledge (Ungerer & Schmid, 1996), which offers us a new model to review and understand language.After accepting the basic hypothesis that the structure of language is not autonomous proposed by modern cognitive linguists, we are completely convinced that people's latent cognitive ability and habit will play a part in the structuring of language. So by applying this cognitive model derived from people's everyday experience to analyze certain language phenomenon, we are able to recognize better the essence that lies behind the surface. From our experience, it happens to coincide that when looking at advertising with idiom, we will be attracted by the deviated part instantly after the original idiom is perceived. This deviated part successfully gets its prominence, due to the judgment of degree of prominence when we deal with the information under the control of our fixed cognitive model in our head. The well-known figure-ground theory establishes itself on the basis of this prominence. Starting from its elementary thoughts, as well as inspired by Talmy's (1978), Kuang Fangtao & Wen Xu's (2003), Wen Xu & Liu Xianqing's (2004) researches on explaining language structure from figure/ground theory, this thesis explores the realization in advertising idioms of Figure and Ground, studied by gestalt psychologists, by which it discovers the "change" is in accordance with the cognitive rule of space organization, in particular the principle of Pragnanze. It is just this coincidence that makes the easy actualization of the prominence of the deviated part. The investigation from the angle of figure/ground argues that advertising idiom is a kind of mechanism that, as an abnormal variety of idioms quite familiar among people, the deviation makes it become the marked Figure via substitution of relative character in certain idiom, thus arouses the most attention from listeners; while the former idiom becomes the Ground, organized according to the deviated part, thus provides it with a favorable environment for its functions to perform nicely. Therefore, we can arrive at such a conclusion: the idiomatic advertisements can be viewed as a relation between Figure and Ground. Some language phenomena, although viewed from the surface they seem to be organized freely, but if analyzed carefully, their inherent essence can be uncovered sufficiently from the perspective of linguistic theories. From the above we can see that language theories like figure-ground theory will have an extensive adaptability and explanatory power as they are used to analyze some language phenomena. After this study, we can discover that the application of figure/ground theory to the idiomatic advertising can help its functions explained better, for the realization of its functions profits from the cognitive model of figure/ground segregation in our perception fields. In addition, the thesis by the way makes clear of the pre-condition for the actualization and understanding of advertising idiom.