The Cognitive Process And Pragmatic Functions Of Puns In Advertisements

The advertising puns are more pervasive than what we can imagine. Based on Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory (1995), the present thesis adopts case study to explore some characteristics peculiar to puns and their functions in advertising. The paper mainly intends to answer these two questions:how do advertising puns possibly lead to smooth communication; why do the advertisers still prefer advertising puns since they contain ambiguity.For how advertising puns lead to smooth communication, the answer lies in that human universal cognitive tendency automatically aims at fulfilling optimal relevance guaranteed by the advertising puns as ostensive stimuli. The advertiser is aware of the audience's expectation of optimal relevance and therefore deliberately exploits advertising puns as ostensive stimuli to convey his intentions. Puns are inherent in the ambiguous nature. In order to achieve optimal relevance of an advertising pun, the audience will trigger the most salient concepts and context to achieve interpretations at the cost of least cognitive effort. In some cases, two different interpretations are derived from a single advertising pun and both of them yield contextual implications in the advertiser's preference, but neither of them is sufficient or complete on its own for the overall presumption of optimal relevance. There is no good reason for the audience to reject either interpretation as irrelevant; hence she would consider both of them as optimal relevant information which the advertiser intends to convey. But advertisers do not usually take risk to communicate two meanings by a single advertising pun. Normally, an advertising pun triggers two interpretations but only one of them is preferred by the advertiser. In some cases, the rejected interpretation provides easy access to some encyclopaedic information, which implicitly suggests positive functions or characteristics of the advertised products and by which the intended interpretation delivers further contextual implications in advertiser's preference as well. In short, an audience applies different inferential models to advertising puns of different type; but no matter how idiosyncratic and sophisticated the inferential process is, the principles of relevance guides the whole process and extra cognitive effort of the audience is usually consumed for pun's innate nature of ambiguity.Based on their peculiar inferential process, advertising puns perform certain pragmatic functions in the ostensive-inferential communication of advertising. Their pragmatic functions include attracting and holding audience's attention by extra cognitive effort, conveying much information by extra cognitive effects, and avoiding social taboos by indirect contextual implication.Overall, this thesis is an illuminating but tentative exploration of advertising puns. It is ■illuminating in that it not only helps the audience appreciate the advertising puns with more comprehensive view but enables the advertisers to make better use of puns in the advertisements. This thesis is tentative in that it expects and encourages more cultural or non-verbal factors to be taken into the study of advertising puns.