A Study On Application Of Context Theory To Advertising English

With the continuous development of society, advertising which aims topropagandize and persuade becomes ubiquitous in our lives. Advertising is a kind ofimportant business activity of making advertisements for selling goods, so it reflectsthe trend, fashion, and values of the society. And advertising English as a specialvariant of language has been the focus of researchers’ study for many years. Lots oflinguists have made deep analysis of advertising English, which is valuable to theunderstanding of this kind of language. However, most of the studies focus on thecharacteristics of advertising English (such as vocabulary features, syntactic features,and rhetoric features), communicational styles, and translational strategies and so oninstead of paying attention to the application of context completely.As one of the most important theories in pragmatics, context theory has attractedthe concern of the majority of scholars in recent years. Context appears in the processof language using. Where there is language, there is context. Recently, the focuses ofcontext study are mainly on its application to teaching (such as vocabulary, grammar,reading, etc), its restriction to translation, and so on. But few scholars have analyzedthe application to advertising English, which is discussed in this thesis.From the perspective of pragmatics and based on the theory of context, thisthesis analyzes and studies the application of context theory to advertising Englishwith the method of case analysis. As advertising appears in a variety of forms, thisthesis mainly analyzes print advertising. First of all, the author explains the content ofthis theory. Next, a simple introduction is made to advertising English. Then thisthesis focuses on the analysis of the application of context theory to advertisingEnglish from two perspectives: linguistic context and non-linguistic context. WhileLinguistic context is divided into phonological context, lexical context, andgrammatical context; non-linguistic context is divided into situational context andcultural context. Through the analysis, it is proved that it is important for advertisingEnglish to apply context. The right application of context determines the success of apiece of advertisement.The author hopes that this study could not only expand the application fields of context theory and enrich the theoretical study of advertising English but also givesome implications to advertisers and translators when they create or translateadvertising. However, as for the application of context theory to advertising English,this is still a relatively new approach to try. This thesis is just an attempt which stillneeds more practice to test. The author sincerely hopes that this thesis could provide anew angle so that advertising English could be fully researched.