A Pragmatic Cognitive Analysis Of Advertising Discourse

A great amount of researches in advertising have been conducted by scholars from the field of linguistics. However, there are always shortcomings in these researches. It has been shown that understanding advertisements is not merely a matter of encoding and decoding, but also a process of inferring. So it should be best approached from the pragmatic perspective. However, pragmatists do not present a convincing account of the nature and role of context. Instead, they attempt to define communication in terms of several maxims. Furthermore, advertising, as a special form of communication, is a dynamic process. The stylistic and the discourse analyses seem to give static descriptions.In the book Relevance: Communication and Cognition published in 1986, Sperber and Wilson developed relevance theory, which maintains that communication is a process involving ostension and inference and that human communication is governed by the principle of relevance: every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance. Relevance theory is such a cognitive theory that provides us an ideal tool for analyzing advertising in the effective communication which is geared to a large target audience.Based on Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory, the present study analyzes the characteristics of advertising communication and how the audience acquires optimal relevance through the linguistic attention-attracting strategies—rhetorical devices in commercial advertising. Through the analysis in this research, the thesis aims to point out the importance of the attention-attracting strategies adopted by the advertiser relevance-oriented in successful advertising communication. Besides, this thesis analyzes the persuasion of advertising language as a special form of communication. The present research is conducted on the basis of case studies, thus the research method employed in this thesis is qualitative.Ostensive-inferential communication happening in the advertising social context shows that trust and cooperation between the interlocutors are limited or lacking. In order to achieve the purpose of informing and persuading, the advertiser may employ various attention-attracting strategies. It is these attention-attracting strategies that give impetus to the audience's inferential process and help the audience acquire optimal relevance. This study presents how the attention-attracting strategies help the audience acquire optimal relevance and discover the informative intention of the advertiser, and analyzes the interpretation process of five linguistic attention-attracting strategies—rhetorical devices from a relevance approach. Based on the case studies of the linguistic attention-attracting strategies, the ostensive-inferential cognitive process model in successful advertising communication is obtained by the author.Advertising language is a special kind of communication form, aiming to persuade the consumers to buy its product or service. So this thesis discusses the realization of the persuasion of advertising in a separate chapter. As a speaker, the advertiser should show expressly the information so as to draw the consumers'attention and stimulate the optimal relevance of the speech so that the customers can achieve it with minimum cognitive efforts. In the meanwhile, advertising should conform to the consumers'demands so as to change their attitude and persuade them to buy the products, thus the perlocutionary effect of the persuasion of advertising is achieved. As a listener, the customer makes an inference together with his own cognitive experience, produces an interest in the information in the advertising and takes actions, during which the persuasion of the advertising speech is successfully achieved.The result of the study indicates that the attention-attracting strategies are crucial to the success of the advertising communication. Thus, it may help the advertiser explore more effective attention-attracting strategies in producing creative advertisements under the guidance of relevance theory. Based on the Relevance Theory and its analysis of the persuasiveness of advertising speech, summarizes that, to successfully achieve its certain persuasion, it is far from enough just to treat advertising as static communication and study it from words, expressions, sentences and discourse. Advertising is a dynamic communication, as in the modern society, the action of purchasing is, to a great extent, governed by customers'emotions. Therefore, it must appeal to consumers'psychological and emotional factors to help them produce certain assumptions and desires in terms of psychology, emotion, vanity etc, so that they make purchasing actions.