Advertising Pun's Figure-ground Analysis And Its Stylistic Effects

In modern society, with the high-speed development of market economy and the intensive competition of commodities, advertising as a tool of transmitting business information is pervasive in people's everyday life. Advertising language, as a special language style, has gradually become a hot topic in the research area. Pun as an interesting language phenomenon has already influenced people from all walks of life. So far, a multitude of studies have been contributed to the study of puns from different perspectives. The pun in advertising is a special kind of advertisement, in which pun is used as a figure of speech. It is very popular in many successful advertising copies because of its features of implication and novelty. During these years, there are many studies conducted on the pun in advertising, which are mainly from the perspective of pragmatic functions, aesthetic functions and translation. There are also some studies based on cognitive linguistics, such as the study of its generative mechanism from Conceptual Blending Theory and the idiomatic advertisement with phonetic pun from Figure-Ground Theory. This thesis will further study the interpretation mechanism of pun in advertising based on Figure-Ground Theory from the angle of the audiences. Besides, the thesis based on the salience of the pun, interpret the pun's stylistic effect by applying the optimal innovation hypothesis.This thesis adopts a qualitative method to analyze the collected puns which are classified into two types that is homographic and homophonic puns based on Figure-Ground Theory. Since pun in advertising language is for special purpose, the thesis further uncovers the puns'stylistic effect based on the optimal innovation hypothesis.