Interpreting Metaphors And Puns In Advertising Slogans With Relevance Theory

Nowadays, advertising has become an essential part of our daily life. As a means of promoting sales, the ultimate purpose of advertising is to persuade the audiences to buy the advertised products or services. Because of the importance of advertising in our daily life, many scholars have studied it from different approaches, namely, semiotic approach, linguistic approach, pragmatic approach and so on.According to Relevance Theory, communication is an ostensive-inferential process. Advertising is also a kind of communication, one between the advertisers and the audiences. So it's also an ostensive-inferential process, in which the advertisers make their informative intention manifest by using ostensive stimuli, such as language, pictures, or music, and the audiences infer the advertisers'real intention by searching for optimal relevance between the new information in these ostensive stimuli and the old assumptions in their cognitive environment. In order to better attract the audiences'attention, the advertisers often use different kinds of rhetoric devices in their advertising. Among these devices, metaphors and puns are frequently used.In this thesis, the author attempts to analyze metaphors and puns in advertising slogans from the perspective of Relevance Theory, with the purpose of showing how to use Relevance Theory to help us understand or create the advertising slogans with metaphors and puns. To begin with, the thesis gives an analysis of advertising in the framework of Relevance Theory. Then it analyzes metaphors and puns employed in advertising slogans from the perspective of Relevance Theory, with the focus on the analysis of the interpreting process of the advertising slogans with metaphors and puns. The conclusion drawn from the analysis is that metaphors and puns are very important for the advertisers to make their advertising slogans more successful, and that Relevance Theory can provide much help for the audiences to interpret the advertising slogans with metaphors and puns. Finally some suggestions are given to the audiences on how to use Relevance Theory to understand such kind of advertising slogans and to the advertisers on how to make better use of metaphors and puns in their advertising slogans.