The Study Of Language Deviation In English Advertising-From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Nowadays, advertising is becoming an integral part of our daily life and is playing an increasing significant role in modern society. It appears we live in an advertising world. A great amount of researches have been carried out in advertising among which the approaches of advertising language have been aroused particular interest, including stylistic approach, sociolinguistic approach, etc., though there are still drawbacks in these approaches. As advertising understanding is a process of inferring, we'd better study it from the pragmatic perspective.In order to fulfill the function of informing and persuading, the advertisers may rely on attention-attracting strategies. The application of the deviation is an efficient way. Deviation, a language phenomenon widely employed by western scholars to study poetic language, means the unusual expression that deviates from norm and appears in lots of forms such as deviation at the level of lexical, grammar and semantics. Some researches have been conducted in the field of deviation in advertising; however, they are always superficial. To be further, this thesis attempts to give a description of deviations in advertising including lexical, grammatical, graphological and semantic deviation.Based on relevance theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson, communication is a cognitive process involving both ostention and inference and communication is governed by the principle of relevance: every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance. Applying this cognitive theory, the thesis tries to study the ostensive-inferential process, the productions of two layers of intention and the degrees of relevance in advertising understanding, so as to make a deeper exploration of information relevance on advertising effects.From the perspective of relevance theory, language deviation functions as a kind of ostensive stimuli, activating audience's process to find the optimal relevance. In the main body of the whole thesis, the author is trying to answer two questions: how the advertisers direct the audience to obtain optimal relevance through the language deviation applied in English advertisements on the basis of relevance theory through case study of 286 pieces of advertisements and how different forms of language deviation can be understood by audience in inferential processes in detail based on the case studies of four forms of deviationLanguage deviation in advertisements causes difficulty in comprehension, however, almost all the advertisers feel like employing it. The reason why it is favored by the advertisers is discussed as it will bring out some pragmatic functions such as making advertisements original, brief, attractive and profound. In addition, the pragmatic functions can be of help to achieve some communicative effects.The present research indicates that language deviation is crucial to the successful advertising comprehension. It helps the advertisers make a better application of various devices of language deviation and make a deeper exploration of more effective devices of deviation in advertising producing. Apart from that, the audience of advertisements may also benefit from the research, including getting a more detailed comprehension in the language deviation in advertisements and thus favoring this attention-attracting strategy.