An Analysis Of Advertising Language Based On The Comparison Of Relevance Theory And Conversational Implicature

Language has a powerful influence on people's life; this is vividly reflected in the field of advertising. We are exposed to advertisements every day and are confronted with advertisements everywhere. Advertising language has aroused great interests of many experts in many disciplines, especially in linguistic fields because advertising language aims at brevity, preciseness and clarity of information besides informing, attracting and persuading people towards certain actions. The way advertising language is used remains an important influencing factor, which demands a systematic study. The main purpose of this study is to make an adequate analysis of the language used in advertising within the framework of two influential pragmatic theories: Relevance Theory and Conversational Implicature.The whole paper is comprised of five chapters.The first chapter is the introduction, which gives us a general description of this thesis, including the motivation, value and methods of this study.Chapter two is the Literature review of previous approaches to the analysis of advertising language. In this chapter, the most important concepts about advertising have been pictured and also several approaches to analyze advertising language have been examined.Chapter three aims to do a comparative study on Relevance Theory and Conversational Implicature, which is done from three perspectives: different interpretation of implicature and explicature, role of context in the two theories and different interpretation on irony.In chapter four, the employment of relevance theory and conversational implicature in advertising language is investigated. How do they effect in advertising language and how does advertising language flout these two theories.Chapter five is the conclusion part, including the findings and limitations of this study and provides suggestions for further study in this field.In this thesis, the author makes an attempt to analyze advertising language with the comparison of two important pragmatic theories: Relevance Theory by Sperber and Wilson and Grice's theory of implicatures. In short, the thesis explores and analyses many ways by which the advertiser of an advertising text can implicate and conveys his intentional meanings through what his advertisements trying to say. This provides us at least one rational point of view to identify what is said and what is actually implied in one commercial ad. From this we can not only touch advertising language in vivid and authentic situations, but also have one more choice of perspective to see social phenomenon concerned with advertising language and achieve a better understanding about this commercial world.