Puns In Advertising: A Relevance-Theoretic Approach

Advertising has become a popular subject of study, approached from a wide range of disciplines, such as anthropology, linguistics, literary criticism, and media studies. The main purpose of this paper is to analyze the puns employed in written advertisements within the framework of pragmatics and to explain the functions of punning in the communication between the advertiser and the audience.It first reviews the studies of advertising language from the point of view of semiotics and linguistics. The pun is a kind of rhetoric skill often used in advertisements, which serves as an object of study in this thesis. The features, functions and especially the specific forms of puns are investigated. The present paper proposes that puns have three functions in written advertising discourses: 1) attracting the audience's attention; 2) making advertisements brief; 3) beautifying advertisements.The analysis of puns in advertising can not only deepen people's understanding of them but also enable the advertiser to make better applications of puns in advertisements.