A Japanese-Chinese Comparison Of Ellipsis In Commercials

Volumes of commercials are flooding into our everyday life in the present information age. As a link of social economic activities, they are laying enormous impacts on people’s life. On one hand, commercials act as one way for the enterprises to expand their market; on the other hand, to the recipients of them, i.e. the consumers, commercials are not indispensable, or to some degree, they are unnecessary. Therefore, advertising language tends to be characterized by expressiveness and conciseness, which is demonstrated by the application of elliptical expressions in commercials. Ellipsis has become an effective approach in the writing of advertisement text.In recent years, though considerable studies on commercials and advertising language have been carried out from different perspectives by scholars in the fields of advertisement and linguistics, there are few studies on the Japanese-Chinese comparison of ellipsis in commercials. Based on the theory of modern linguistics and under the perspective of comparative linguistics, this thesis has made the lexical, grammatical and pragmatic comparisons on ellipsis between Japanese commercials and Chinese ones to find out their respective characteristics, draw out the laws, analyze the causes and significance and consequently point out the further studies.Viewpoints have been put forward after a comprehensive analysis and comparison on ellipsis in Japanese and Chinese commercials. In terms of lexicon, ellipsis is illustrated by the elliptical expressions in product names. This thesis divides it into four categories, namely, idiomatic ellipsis, suspected ellipsis, ellipsis of imported products and ellipsis of medicines and makes respective comparisons. In terms of grammar, although ellipses in Japanese and Chinese advertising languages present different characters in simple sentences, compound and complex sentences and contexts, ellipses in Japanese commercials tend to be more complicated. The former two aspects are verbal ellipses in commercials. In terms of pragmatics, elliptical expressions in commercials are usually demonstrated by the non-verbal expressions. Comparing from the aspects of logo, spokesperson, and jingle, this thesis concludes that non-verbal ellipses in Japanese and Chinese commercials are similar to each other.In a word, the interaction of verbal ellipses and non-verbal expressions in commercials has made commercials vivid and persuasive.