A Cognitive Pragmatic Approach To Chinese Tobacco Advertisement Puns

In China, tobacco advertisement, even though forbidden by law, still appears a lot in mass media, especially on TV and in some printed publicities. Most advertisements such as public service advertising and enterprise brand publicity, that advertisers play word game by using puns or other rhetorics in order to hide the truth from the legal responsibility. Pun is a special language phenomenon with a long history. With the advancement of the society and the development of the times, pun has already permeated into every domain in people’s life. This thesis divides it into seven groups by breaking through the traditional criterion for classification and gives the delicate descriptions.Because of the tobacco advertisement’s specialty and all kinds of law restriction, audiences must pay more effort to understand the tobacco advertisement. This thesis makes an integration study from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics, on the basis of relevance theory and conceptual integration theory, effectually combines these two theories and point out their resemblance and complementation, then offers a new model——"relevance-integration model". This model takes relevance theory as a premise, guides the knower to select some relevant conceptual structure of every mental space, and projects to blend space, and makes use of conceptual integration network graph dynamically to present this cognitive process of knower to tobacco advertisement.Through cases analysis, we find:(1) the Chinese tobacco advertisement pun’s understanding not only depends on relevance and inferential, but also on conceptual integration and emergent structure, and both of them are indispensable;(2) relevance-integration model is very effective in interpreting Chinese tobacco advertisement pun for people, as it dynamically presents this integration cognitive process of people interpret advertisement intention.The research result of this thesis is a new try. lit is not only broadens this model’s application, but also enriches its study of Chinese tobacco advertisement pun. And it has some values on the study of humor language; irony and xiehouyu in the future.