A Study On Chinese Real Estate Advertising-A Semiotic Perspective

Nowadays advertising is everywhere. It is the inescapable result of the economic development and free circulation of information. It goes without saying that commercials are closely related to many aspects of our life, and are commonly seen in our daily life. The study on advertising can be found in various branches of learning, such as mass communications, sociology, linguistics.We can say that advertising is penetrating into the production of meaning. That is to say, advertising is not only satisfied with being a provider of products and services, but also takes pains to add new ideas to the advertised products and services, so as to create a new lifestyle which is built up on dreams or illusions, simultaneously it pushes hard to make media audience accustomed to this newly-created lifestyle. Hence the potential influence of advertising is produced: The advertising kindles the receptors' purchasing power up with social value attached to the advertising, the purchase then follows up. The author holds that this phenomenon can be best explained from a semiotic perspective. The paper is an attempt of study on this dimension of advertising, to be more exact, the real estate advertising.The real estate advertising has gained more and more concern since the real estate industry becomes hot in almost all cities in China. Many linguistic researches on advertising have been laid on social linguistics, pragmatics, stylistics and the like. Among these researches, the English advertising for real estate mainly cover stylistic features, for example, many researches are addressed on the linguistic features, rhetoric features. The studies on Chinese real estate advertising mainly focus on communications and sociology. Studies on Chinese real estate advertising from lingual view generally fall on CDA. Generally, meaning construction in these advertisements has been more or less neglected in these researches. The author intends to decode this aspect of advertising.The author here endeavors to do a qualitative analysis of the data collected by the application of both semiology and pragmatics. The advertisers employ advertisements to create concepts of life on purpose, resulting in the acceptation of the advertised concepts from audience, so as to encourage more purchase. Words like "尊贵,典雅,稀缺资源, 上流生活,豪宅,少数人享有,高尚社区,黄金商圈" are used in many advertisements for real estate to convey a sense that housing is not only a product which can satisfy the basic need of accommodation, but also a luxury which implies a sign of the occupation of higher social status for the owners. The paper combines the basic concepts in semiology, namely signifier, signified, meaning; denotation and connotation, and presupposition, metaphor in pragmatics to decode the advertising for real estate. Therefore, what makes the paper different is that the paper sets out to find out hidden truth behind the real estate advertising by applying semiology and pragmatics.The real estate advertisers utilize mass media to create a certain atmosphere imperceptibly so as to encourage more purchase, which means to turn a concept into action to gain more profit. The author uses the basic theory of semiology and pragmatics to analyze this phenomenon.