A Study Of Advertisements Of Military Equipment Within Relevance Theory

In recent years, with the development of international relations, military exchanges among different countries are becoming more and more frequent. And the trade of military equipment has become very important. For this reason, governments, contractors or any organization concerned with the trade of military equipment have paid great attention to this issue. In order to promote the scale and efficiency of military trade, all the possible means have been tried, including advertising. Unfortunately, the method of advertising has not been thoroughly investigated by the Chinese military manufacturers. The function of it has not been fully performed. Thus it would be necessary for the Chinese military companies and manufacturers to carry out a comprehensive research about this issue.Advertising is one kind of ostensive communication. Thus it can be analyzed with the theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson, that is, the relevance theory. As the advertising theory suggests, the first and foremost step of a successful advertising is to draw the audience's attention. So the present study aims at investigating the language of advertisement, especially the attention-drawing devices applied to advertisements of military equipment from the perspective of relevance theory.During the analysis, the author firstly gives an introduction about advertisement and advertising language. Then he briefly reviews the related scholars' works. Their researches could be divided into four types: the semiotic analysis, the stylistic analysis, the discourse analysis and the pragmatic analysis. Not all of them could explain or interpret the advertising language satisfactorily. In the third and fourth chapters of this thesis, the author proposes the theory of Sperber and Wilson, especially the presumption of optimal relevance and its consequences. The possibility of applying relevance theory to the interpretation of advertisements of military equipment has been confirmed. In the main part of this thesis, the author proposes seven attention-drawing devices most-frequently used in the advertisements of military equipment, i.e. pun, metaphor, hyperbole, parody, paradox, synecdoche, and repetition. According to the presumption of optimal relevance, there are two consequences:(a) The first satisfactory interpretation is the only satisfactory one;(b) Extra processing effort demanded should be offset by extra (or different) effects.These two consequences are applied to the interpretation of the functioning process of attention-drawing devices. These seven devices could be interpreted from the perspective of either the first consequence or the second one (or both). The virtue of applying these devices is that it could spare the audience unjustifiable processing effort; and once extra effort is required, extra cognitive effect will be surely achieved. It could be noticed that the attention-drawing devices are very important for the understanding of an advertisement. It is these devices that invoke the audience's inferential process and direct him towards his expectation of optimal relevance.After a careful investigation, the author finds that compared with the advertisement of civilian goods, the attention-drawing devices employed by the advertisements of military equipment are less than those of the civilian ones. For example, in the advertisements of military equipments, the device of irony is rarely seen. Another finding is that although almost all the devices of the advertisements of military equipment could be analyzed from both the perspectives of two consequences, there is one exception which could only be investigated from the perspective of the second one. That is, the device of pun with two interpretations intended.Theoretically, the explanatory power of the relevance theory, especially the presumption of optimal relevance, in the analysis of the attention-drawing devices in advertisements of military equipment has been confirmed. Practically, the findings of this research could enlighten the manufacturers of military equipment in China to be aware of the functioning mechanism of advertising, especially its attention-drawing devices and improve their advertisement designing. Limitations of the present study and suggestions for future research are discussed at the end of this thesis.