English Advertising In The Pun, From Speech Act Theory

With the rapid development of advertising enterprise, modern advertisements play a more and more important role in the international commercial activities. Advertisements employ various communication media to disseminate information with the aim of propagating, that is to say to trigger the consumer desire and activity of the public. The advertising language, as the carrier of information communication and dissemination, plays an indispensable role. This thesis will use speech act theory to analyze the pun-using phenomenon in advertising language.This thesis uses Austin's and Searle's speech act theory as the foundation and together with Grice's cooperative principle theory and Sperber, D. and Wilson, D.'s relevance theory to make an adequate analysis of puns' usage in English advertisements. Chapter One is a general description of the three theories and their application in puns. The pun is a kind of rhetoric skill that is often used in commercial advertisements, which serves as a study carrier in this thesis. In Chapter Two, some basic information of puns is introduced, such as the definitions of puns, function of puns, the specific forms of puns, etc. Chapter three analyzes the selected examples in light of speech act theory according to the specific forms of puns. After the analysis, we would see the advertising language with puns is more meaningful, and we could not get the complete idea of the seller and the ads writer from the surface of the advertising language. Just because of this, people will have a much deeper and longer impression of the advertising language with puns, and this is a good phenomenon to the seller.