A Study Of The Puns In English Advertisements From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

With the development of economy, puns have penetrated into all the fields of people's lives in modern world. In order to make the advertisements more attractive and convey more information to the public with as less money and space as possible, the advertisers pay more attention to language devices for the sales of products. Here, this paper mainly studies the use of puns in advertisements. Based on Relevance Theory, this paper analyzes the mechanism about how to understand a pun from the pragmatic view, and the reasons why more advertisers choose this device to attract the public and how to ensure successful communication between them.Puns are employed to achieve humorous effect or amusement with the use of one word which has more than one meaning or two words which have similar sounds or meanings. This definition also suggests two features:ambiguity and double context. Ambiguity means that people can get more than two meanings from a pun, be it intended or not. One meaning is salient, and the other is implied, which needs the audience's efforts to process. Besides, each meaning exists in its own context. Corresponding to ambiguity, there are overt context and covert context. That is to say, literal meaning exists in overt context, and deep meaning exists in covert context.This paper also discusses about definition and language of advertisement so that people can understand better why the advertiser prefers to adopt puns in advertisements. Most advertisements are direct, simple and rhetorical. Because a pun is usually short and expresses more meanings with less word and less space, it is frequently employed in advertisement to attract more audience.Nowadays, puns are widely adopted in daily life. In the past, the study of puns is mainly restricted in rhetoric, such as classification, properties, and rhetoric functions. Recently, more and more scholars pay attention to them. Some take a semantic study of puns in terms of the ambiguity. Some put forward aesthetic study of puns. Some focus on pragmatic level. Thanks to the development of linguistics in various fields, many scholars no longer limit themselves to the explanations of this figure of speech only from traditional rhetorical view, but begin analyzing them from many other aspects. This paper mainly studies this kind of device from Relevance Theory, which was formally proposed by Sperber and Wilson.The Relevance Theory can be defined as "every act of ostensive communication communicates the presumption of its own optimal relevance". The communication is an ostensive-inferential cognitive action. The ostensive act is to demonstrate the speaker's intention, and the inferential act is to infer what the speaker says combining the hearer's cognitive context. The communication is successful, not only because the hearer can understand the linguistic meaning of the utterance, but also because the speaker makes an ostension, and the hearer can infer his intention from the evidence. Sperber and Wilson bring forward the concept of "relevance" in terms of processing effort and contextual effect. For each communication, the purpose is to get optimal relevance, rather than relevance. That is to make as less processing effort as possible and achieve as much contextual effect as possible. Of course, the context is crucial to understanding the advertiser's intention. The audience can make use of his encyclopedic, logical, and language knowledge so as to produce context information related to the utterance. What the advertiser wants is that the audience can infer from the contexts and make implicatures.The author also introduces classifications and functions of puns used in advertisements. In fact, a pun takes several forms in advertisements and there is no unified standard for the classification. Some divide puns into homophones, homonyms, and homographs. Some classify puns into phonetic pun, semantic pun and pragmatic pun. To summarize the above classifications, there are five main kinds of puns in advertisements:phonetic pun, semantic pun, grammatical pun, idiomatic pun and brand name pun. Generally speaking, a pun has the following characteristics:brevity, novelty and creativity, full of humor, and aesthetics. All of puns'characteristics contribute to several functions, or explain why the advertiser prefers to use puns in advertisements. Puns can convey information, attract the public's attention, stimulate the desires of customers to buy the products, and also can avoid social taboos.Relevance Theory has four core concepts which can help people to understand the puns in English advertisements. The advertisement is a kind of communication with implied meanings, which requires the advertiser to make an ostension so that the audience can infer his intention. Since puns are ambiguous, the elimination of ambiguity and establishment of contexts are necessary. Of course, the purpose is that the audience can obtain implied meanings of the advertisements and finally buy the products or services. This paper adopts many examples to elaborate how to apply Relevance Theory to puns.The study also finds that people's cultural background influences the interpretation of puns. Though this paper is far from perfection, it is hoped that this study can provide a new angle for the future researches.