Memetic Interpretation On Advertising Language

With the development of global economy, many foreign products are pouring into the Chinese market competing with homemade products. To meet the challenge, one resort for domestic companies is to find more workable ways to create effective Chinese advertisements; meanwhile, many Chinese products are flowing abroad. They require effective English advertisements to establish their images in the world business arena. Under these circumstances, the linguistic study of advertising language is of great significance for the creation of efficient advertisements.A lot of research work has been done on the advertising language itself and its surface structures and on the role of culture in advertising. In view of the vital function of culture in advertising, this thesis attempts to further examine this issue from the perspective of memetics so as to approach the study of advertising language from a new angle.Memetics, based on Darwinian evolutionism, is a new theory used for explaining the cultural evolution. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a meme as "an element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, esp. imitation". (Cf. Blackmore, 1998) The transmission feature of meme has a natural instinct association with the propagation of advertising.The memetic approach is adopted in the thesis, which is mainly composed of the following six chapters.Chapter One is a general introduction to the thesis. We firstly present a brief introduction about meme and the main studies on memetics; on the later part of the introduction, rationales, research questions, objectives and significance of the study, date collection and research methodology and the framework of the thesis are introduced. Chapter Two is a comprehensive review of related researches, which is mainly composed of a brief review of advertising and the studies on advertising to present a clear view of advertising language; then, a brief review on memetics, including the origin and working definition of meme, the related terms, the selection criteria of meme and the process of meme replication.Chapter Three focuses on the memetic study on advertising language, including the relationship of meme and language, memetic study on advertising language and the analysis of two types of advertising language memes in their transmission process, and examines the memetic essence of advertising language propagation in a cross-cultural context.Based on the previous statements and analyses, Chapter Four is devoted to exploring the selection criteria of the advertising language memes, mainly including similarity, novelty and expressivity, and illustrates them with detailed examples.As an extension of Chapter Four, Chapter Five examines the creation of advertising language in the cross-cultural context, mainly dealing with the different cultural perceptions of the target consumers which the advertising practitioners should take into consideration.Finally, Chapter Six is the conclusion part, in which the major findings are described, the limitations of the thesis and suggestions for further research are set forth.It is hoped that the present thesis will offer some insight to the advertising practitioners during their process of advertisements creation and serve the purpose of inspiring more new memetic studies on the advertising language research.