A Semiotic Xi'an Real Estate Advertising Research

Residence, the material living space built by human beings for themselves, originally aims at providing a living place as a shelter. From this angle of view, the function of a house, no matter what its shape, its size, or the location is, is all the same. However, in modern society, the consumption of residence is not limited to the function and effectiveness on the material level, but focuses more on the symbolic meaning it offers. Estate advertisements, the principal way of the house promotion, undoubtedly play a pushing role in the formation of the symbolic meanings.With the research method of content analysis, this paper chooses Chinese Business View as the sample of Xi'an estate advertisements, and carefully analyzes the estate advertisements of residence in the estate information page on every Friday in 2008. With some theories of semiotics, and the estate advertisements as a context which produces "meanings", the paper observes the origin of the "meanings" from the internal demands of consumers. First, by way of discussing the relation between the symbolic attribute of consumption and advertizing propagation, it demonstrates the symbolic attribute of consumption in modern society, and the symbolic feature of advertisements——the main way of marketing products and the process of its symbolization, as well as the compatibility between semiotics and the estate advertisements analysis. Second, it gives an overall description of the chosen samples in terms of page position, page size, and kinds of building projects. Further more, with the 14 chosen variables, it fully analyzes the lingual symbols and visual symbols from the quotas such as high-frequency words, the demand form, the demand theme, picture kinds, picture factors, and strives to give a brand-new look to Xi'an estate advertisements.Besides, the content analysis proves the features of the lingual symbols and visual symbols of the estate advertisements, and with these features, the paper thoroughly analyzes the meanings produced by the estate advertisements which are a collection of symbols. The paper concludes that the meanings produced by the estate advertisements can be summed up in three aspects: status symbol, way of life, and home atmosphere, and through the thorough analysis of their origin, shows the real purpose of the estate advertisements.