From The Language Of Cognitive Science Point Of View Analysis The Impact Of The Context Of Advertising Discourse

In the present"Information Age", the modern commercialized society is inundated with advertisements which mirror people's lives and social culture. As a carrier of commercial information, advertisement is playing more and more important part in people's daily life, and the study of advertising language has drawn more and more attention of linguists.The advertising discourse heavily depends on the interaction between the contexts in discourse, and the hearer/reader's cognition. Moreover, advertising is not only a linguistic and pragmatic behavior, but also a psychological process. The main purpose of this study is to make an adequate analysis of the language in advertising discourse, within the framework of context in Verschueren's Adaptation Theory and Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory. It aims at analyzing the impact of contexts such as social context, cultural context, cognitive context and dynamic context etc on the hearer/reader's interpretation of advertising discourse. The thesis probes into the topic from the following aspects, beginning with the relationship between meaning and context in discourse, and then expounding the impact of contexts with its dynamic and cognitive nature in the interpretation process between the advertiser and his audience. In addition, this paper demonstrates the dynamic contextual correlates of adaptability which motivates the advertiser to make full adaptability to audience's communicative context (social world, physical world and mental world) in order to achieve the persuasive function of the advertised, and Chapter Three probes in detail into multi-functions of context. And Dynamics of Context on Advertising Discourse is studied as a focus in Chapter Four in this paper.In the thesis, as a result, we find out that first, the adaptation process is advertiser's making choices in language use to satisfy audience's needs based on the regulation of adaptation to communicative context. All in all, it is addressee-oriented. Secondly, it can be found that the interpretation process is ostensive-inferential communication in which the audience seeks the optimal relevance through contextual elements, such as ostensive stimulus and mutual manifestness, and then successfully infers advertiser's true intention. Therefore, it is an interaction between the advertiser and hearer/reader that has been given much discussion. The study of this thesis is an empirical one because it is mainly based on the qualitative analysis of the data collected from related topics of similar genres published in the printed magazine or newspaper and some of them from the websites of the ads products. It is hoped that the thesis has theoretical function in practical application of advertisings, thus helping the advertiser realize the importance of the application of the choice of advertising language to successfully perform attention-attracting strategies, especially, providing a theoretical instruction for English teachers in teaching vocabulary and discourse comprehension, and also, helping communicators with different background knowledge become aware of the existence of social and cultural context and then avoid unnecessary pragmatic failure.