A Study Of Bilingual Food Advertisements: From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

With the development of modern society, advertisements have penetrated into our daily life and have become an indispensable part of daily human life. Advertising language is the most important carrier of information in an advertisement, and it has been used widely in business world. As a result, advertising language has become a fixed register. Therefore, the study of advertising language is the key to the effective construction and interpretation of advertisements.This thesis is an investigation on what advertisers have done and will do to adapt to the mental world and social world of customers in food advertising. Concerning this issue questions being explored include how advertisers address certain aspects of the audience's world and how their linguistic choices are manifested. This study is a qualitative analysis of the data collected. And this study is, in fact, a pragmatic interpretation of these data. The data under investigation are mainly confined to food advertisements in China and abroad. Besides, some of the data are collected from the internet where necessary. Supported by Verschueren's Adaptation Theory, the author proposes that the production of advertising language is the realization of adaptation. Customer's being persuaded into purchasing some products is determined by the fact that the advertising language must adapt to the specific contexts. The analysis is conducted along the continuum of mental world and social world from the three key notions in Adaptation Theory, viz, variability, negotiability and adaptability. The dynamic adaptation between the linguistic choice of advertisers and the mind of customers is thus revealed and elaborated. At the same time, the study emphasizes that advertisers cannot ignore the effects of the social world of prospective customers. The author analyses how advertisers adapt to customers'mental world by using rational appeal and emotional appeal in order to persuade customers into taking purchasing actions. Meanwhile, advertisers have to make negotiable linguistic choices to adapt to customers'social world. In the field of food advertising language, the linguistic choices related to rational appeal are made to adapt to the needs for nutrition, credibility, flavor and low prices. The linguistic choices related to emotional appeal are made to adapt to personal needs for fashion and social status. Besides, advertisers have to make linguistic choices so as to adapt to the social settings and institutions and social culture. Drawing on a range of work in pragmatics, advertising and communication, this paper attempts to make contributions to this particular communicative dimension of advertising language.