An Exploration Of Advertisement: From The Perspective Of Intertextuality

Since the term"Intertextuality"has been introduced by Julia Kristeva in 1960s, the researches on intertextuality have drawn an increasingly attention from literature and other fields. Intertextuality insists that any text cannot exist alone without any other texts, this text and other texts, the present text and the previous texts all together form a text network system which interact each other. While advertisement, as a parasitic text, is the outcome of different kinds of texts integrated together. Based on the popularity and persuasiveness of advertisement, with the employment of intertextuality, mainly manifest intertextuality and constitutive intertextuality proposed by Hatim & Mason as the framework to make an analysis on intertextual phenomena in advertisements and more emphasis are placed on how the value of an advertisement manifests through intertextuality as well as the widely used types in successful advertisements. All these show that intertextuality has become a new perspective of advertising design and provides a more research space with advertisement.This thesis adopts a qualitative analysis toward 22 advertisements abstracted from newspapers, magazines and TV advertisements to elaborate the frequently used types of intertextual relationships in modern advertisements along with how advertisements achieve the persuasive effects by these intertextual relationships, and the implications of intertextuality in advertisements drawn from this study will lay significance on future research.This thesis is to analyse advertisements with the aid of the theory of intertextuality. Most of the reason is that the abundant implications, which can be fully grasped through the analysis of intertextual relationships, lie under the comparative succint languages. The simple languages of advertisements call for the varied and effective rhetorical techniques and images in order to be easily remembered and finally take purchasing actions by consumers. Therefore, the point of this thesis is that how these intertextual relationships represent in advertisements.The thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter demonstrates the research objectives, research data and methodology, significance and research questions, organizations of the thesis will also be incorporated in this chapter. Chapter two provides historical overview of intertextuality and advertisement, previous studies have been done on intertextuality and advertisement at home and abroad. The theoretical framework of the thesis, the nine classifications of manifest intertextuality and constitutive intertextuality introduced by Hatim & Mason, are the concern of chapter three. Chapter four is the highlight of the thesis, it expounds the study of the nature of advertisement and exemplifies the employment of intertextuality in advertisements from two aspects: manifest and constitutive intertextuality. Chapter five presents the major findings,limitations as well as implications of the study.To sum up, the employment of manifest and constitutive intertextuality in advertisements in this thesis contributes a lot to the further study of advertisements. It will also help arouse more and more advertising designers and consumers to pay attention to the application of intertextuality in advertisement.