A Study Of Debit Card Advertisement Language In The Perspective Of Contextual Contextual Adaption Theory

Along with the prosperity of financial market, the financial advertisement is playing a bigger role. Hence, there are more and more studies on financial advertisement. As a communicative language, advertisement is the continuous process of choice-making of language consciously or unconsciously. The communicative success depends on the communicative strategies.On the basis of the Contextual Adaption Theory of Jeff Vershchueren, the most basic financial product-the debit card is analyzed and thus explained on these aspects that how the debit card adapt the consumers’mental world, the social world and the physical world. On the basis of Contextual Adaption Theory and relative advertisement knowledge, the debit cards of3banks are analyzed quantitatively. A state-owned commercial bank—China Construction Bank(CCB), a foreign-funded bank—Citibank(Citi) and a local commercial bank—Bank of Chengdu (BOCD) are analyzed and compared. These3banks are very representative in the debit card advertisement.According to the analysis, this paper illustrates what linguistic or adaptive strategies the debit card takes, how the advertisement language adapts the context, what to adapt and through the adaption progress, how the advertisement language persuades the potential consumers to accept and finally make the decision of the purchase of the product or the service.Through the analysis on the basis of Contextual Adaption Theory, the author hopes to enlighten the advertisers in the composition of financial advertisements. With the economic globalization, the financial products of foreign-funded banks are entering into the Chinese market which should adapt to the Chinese linguistic context and communicative context. And also Chinese banks into the international market should adapt to the native context and culture for better advertisement of the financial products.This thesis contains five chapters in all. The1st chapter mainly introduces the research background, the purpose and the significance of this paper as well as the structure of this paper. The second chapter is the literature review which introduces the definition, the nature and the classification of this paper as well as the previous study of advertisement, financial advertisement and debit card advertisement. The third chapter is the theoretical framework of this study. On the basis of the Contextual Adaption Theory of Verschueren, the3properties and4research angles of language are explained. Also the related studies of Contextual Adaption Theory and the relationship between the theory and advertisement language are illustrated. The forth chapter is the adaptive analysis of the debit cards from foreign-funded and domestic banks. In the process, a state-owned bank-CCB, a local commercial bank-BOCD and a foreign-funded bank are taken as examples from the linguistic structure and communicative context. And the last chapter is the conclusion of this thesis. On the basis of Contextual Adaption Theory, the financial advertisement is adapted to promote the issue of debit cards. Besides, the research achievements and shortcomings are concluded as well as some suggestions for further studies in this chapter.