A Study Of Advertising Communication In Relevance-theoretic Approach

Advertising is a sophisticated social phenomenon. Various linguistic methods have been used in its analysis, but many of which are confined to the description of language, lacking further discussion of the audience's role. Relevance Theory, as a pragmatic theory combined with cognition, is acknowledged as a theory which better depicts the human linguistic ability and explains the comprehension procedure of verbal communication. This article attempts to apply some of notions from Relevance Theory to the analysis of advertising. It sees advertising from a cognitive communicative perspective and try to analyze some advertisements. The objects of the analysis are limited to written advertisements or radio and TV advertisements which can be transcribed.Advertising in the thesis is regarded as an ostensive-inferential communication. The study of advertising belongs to the field of Relevance Theory's study. The primary goal of an advertisement is to achieve some connection with the audience. From Relevance-theoretic view, such connection is relevance, a property of utterance when it can produce cognitive effects in the audience's contextual assumptions. For an advertisement to be effective it must create cognitive effects, otherwise, it is a failure.Advertising observes two Relevance Principles: the Cognitive Principle and the Communicative Principle. The notion maximal relevance contained in the first principle helps to explain the audience's cognitive tendency: taking the least processing effort to get the greatest cognitive effect. The notion optimal relevance contained in the second principle shows the task advertisers face: how to achieve optimal relevance, namely, how to encourage audience to take some effort (not the least effort) to understand advertisements and get satisfactory cognitive effects.Advertising communication is a game between the advertisers and the target audience, in which the audience always show little co-operation and are quick to filtrate those"irrelevant"advertisements while advertisers are desperate to fill in the limited space and time with as much information as possible, thus achieving language magic.After defining the cognitive nature of advertising communication, the thesis explores cognitive environment and mutual cognitive environment—the basis of successful communication. It also discusses two kinds of information: explicature and implicature and analyzes two effects brought by new information: information effect and contextual effect. Information effect is confined to the information level while contextual effect is an important index for advertisement effectiveness. Thereby, a relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure is also introduced.The theoretic part also expands ostensive stimuli to its correspondence in advertising and points out its role in understanding advertisements.The application part is tentative. It tries to classify advertisements into two types: explicit advertisements and implicit advertisements. Based on the inference of Relevance Theory, it analyzes the understanding procedure of both categories and proposes that explicit advertisements also involve inference and identification of implied assumptions. The rest part focuses on the discussion of the comprehension procedure on lexical, syntactical and rhetoric level (puns are mainly studied). The effectiveness is also compared.