An Analysis Of Fulfillment Of Communicative Intention Of Advertising Slogans In English With Relevance Theory

As a means of promoting sales, advertising has become an essential part of people's daily life. The ultimate purpose of advertising is to persuade the audience to buy the product advertised, thus the advertiser will definitely put a lot of efforts into linguistic choices which are of great importance to attract the attention of the audience. There were numerous studies in advertising especially in English advertising both in advertising field and linguistic field, namely, comparative study between Chinese and English advertising, the rhetorical devices of English advertising, etc.Relevance theory holds that communication is an ostensive-inferential communication, which is in fact a process to make recognition and mutual manifestness of cognitive environment. During such process, the speaker may first give ostensive information to inform his informative intention on the one hand and inform that he has also have a communicative intention. The hearer will infer what he hears under relevance theory. As advertising is a special form of communication, the advertiser will choose some strategies to attract the audience's attention, in order to make the audience accept the communicative intention by the advertiser. While as the eyes of an advertisement, the advertising slogans play a very important role in a successful advertising.This dissertation, based on relevance theory, focuses its attention on studying how an advertiser makes his intention manifest to an audience to achieve the fulfillment on the communicative intention through some strategies—rhetorical devices in the process of communication. And the author gives some implications on the advertiser. In the end, the author draws a conclusion that during the process of fulfillment of communicative intention of advertising slogans in English, the strategies are vital for the audience to understand advertising slogans and the author hopes the implications for the advertising slogans designers can be helpful for those business branches as well.