An Application Of The Adaptation Theory In Public Service Advertisement

With the development of society, public service advertisement, as a major component of the modern culture, plays a more and more important part in people's life. While much attention has been paid to the phenomenon and some researches have been made on the linguistic aspects of advertisement, the study on public service advertisement has been neglected by many scholars from a pragmatic perspective. This thesis is going to make a comprehensive research on the public service advertisement with the pragmatic analysis. The function of public service advertisement is to encourage and guide people to do beneficial behaviors and to arouse people's consciousness to concern social affairs. So its language use must be vivid and eye-catching, and hence a complex process of making relevant choices constantly. The study is based on Jef Verschueren's adaptation theory to analyze and discuss the process of language adaptation in the development of public service advertisement. As Verschueren's theory assumes, language use is a continuous making of linguistic choices with different degree of salience for the purpose of communication. Language users make choices continuously or uncontinuously in the process of language use, because language in communication has variability, negotiability and adaptability as its natural property. Any language use can be explained from four aspects: contextual correlates of adaptability, structural objects of adaptability, dynamics of adaptability and salience of the adaptation processes. This study is an empirical one, mainly supported by analysis of original data.This study reveals various patterns of public services advertisements, and through analyzing the features of their languages, it explains: (1) what kinds of language choices public service advertisement makes; (2) how public service advertisement realizes the communicative goal according to the adaptation theory. By studying the words, structures and figures of speech of public service advertisements, the research finds out the language choices of public service advertisements, and with Verschueren's adaptation theory, it explains public service advertisements that adapt to the mental world, the social world and the physical world can be accepted by people easily.It is hoped that this study can enrich the pragmatic studies on public service advertisement and also make advertisers create more effective public service advertisement.