On Coherence Construction In Interpreting Print Auto Advertising

Advertising is one of the media products people are most exposed to in modern life. Language is the important carrier of advertising, for which language in advertising has attracted a wide attention from the linguists at home and abroad. They are Geoffrey N. Leech (1966), Vestergaard and Schroder (1985), Keido Tanaka (1994), Guy Cook (1992), Huang Guowen (2001) and Judith Williamson (1983). They have explored the linguistic features of advertising, pragmatic and cognitive factors that contribute to the understanding of advertising respectively from the perspective of stylistic, social linguistic, pragmatic, discourse and semiotic approaches. However, few of the studies mentioned above have ever undertaken a systematic analysis of coherence in advertising. Guy Cook and Huang Guowen touch on only some cohesive ties.The process of coherence construction is at the same time the process of interpreting a discourse. If we interpret a discourse well, we will then achieve the purpose of constructing coherence. This paper intends to explore the coherence in print auto advertisements from the perspective of overt coherence and covert coherence. The overt coherence is constructed through Halliday and Hasan's cohesion theory while the covert coherence the relevance theory. Halliday and Hasan classify the cohesion into grammatical cohesion, which includes reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion, which includes reiteration and collocation. Relevance theory holds 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. In this thesis twenty nine print auto advertisements from Time and some websites are selected. The study reveals that some auto advertisements achieve coherence by virtue of cohesive ties while other auto advertisements without cohesive ties achieve coherence by means of inferences based on the relevance theory, among which some typical auto advertisements with the features of pun, metaphor, personification and pictures are selected and the author analyzes how readers conduct inference and then how coherence is constructed.The significance of the thesis lies in the following two respects. On the one hand the cohesion theory helps us understand the linguistic features of auto advertisements more profoundly; on the other hand, the relevance theory helps us appreciate the advertisement creativity, activate the imaginary thinking and provide a guide to those who majors in advertisement design. However, there are some limitations concerning the thesis. First, since the corpus selected is small, other factors that may influence the coherence of auto advertisements may be overlooked. Second, the thesis focuses on print auto advertisings and thus ignores the cohesive function of spoken acts of language, such as speech and intonation.