A Study Of The Interpretation Process Of Pun In English Advertisements

Advertising is a highly effective tool of communication and persuasion. Pun, as aprominent form of wordplay, has been widely employed in advertisements. Some scholarsboth home and abroad have studied the classifications and its distribution; and some scholarshave studied the translation of advertising puns. However, few studies have adopted thecognitive approach to analyze and interpret puns. Therefore, combined with examplescollected from newspapers and magazines, this paper tries to explore the interpreting processwith cognitive theories.First, this paper discusses the formation of pun from cognitive and psychological viewand then gives a summary of the classifications based on previous studies. From the formationof pun, it can be classified into homophonic pun, semantic pun, grammatical pun andidiomatic pun.Then, based on Sperber&Wilson’s Relevance Theory and Fauconnier&Turnenr’sConceptual Blending Theory, this paper analyzes the interpretation process of advertisingpun in detail. Relevance Theory is a common and effective theory, because pun alwayscontains relevance. Relevance has close relationship with context. Audience would get theintentional meaning through his inference under the circumstance. Conceptual BlendingTheory has complete theoretical framework and sophisticated operating mechanism; hence, ithas shown great explanatory power in meaning construction of many linguistic phenomena.From the analysis we can get that Relevance Theory and Conceptual Blending Theoryare helpful in interpreting pun. Furthermore, the combination of the Relevance Theory andConceptual Blending Theory also does work in the interpretation of advertising pun. UnderRelevance Theory, audience can reject the irrelevant interpretation, and extend his context toperuse the intended interpretation and contextual effects. Context plays a crucial role in thistheory. For different kinds of pun, there are corresponding networks for the interpretationprocess of it. For homophonic pun, the single-scope network and mirror network can explainthe interpretation process of it. The interpretation process of semantic pun can be clearlyanalyzed by double-scope network. Double-scope network does well in explaining theinterpretation process of grammatical pun. The understanding process of idiomatic pun can be analyzed vividly by mirror network and simplex network. For the combination of the twotheories, this article tries to put forward a model and applies into the interpretation ofadvertising puns.Finally, the thesis gives some suggestions for translation of the advertising puns. As thesource language advertiser and the target language audience sometimes do not share commoncognitive environment, the translator should guarantee that the translated version is easilyunderstood by the target language audiences.