A Study Of Pun In Advertising From The Perspective Of Figure-Ground Theory

In the current society, the rapid development of the market economy leads tothe fierce competition of commodities. And the development of the mass media hasmade all kinds of advertisements prevalent in our daily life. Advertising language, asa special form, has been attracting the researchers’ attention of linguistics field. Pun inadvertising refers to the advertisement which adopts pun. Pun has been adopted bymany perfect advertisements for its features of brevity and novelty. Most advertisersstudy the pun from the perspectives of pragmatics, aesthetics and translation as wellas from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. For example, on the cognitiveinterpretation of advertisement pun, and the study of pun in advertising from theperspective of Figure-Ground theory. This thesis makes a further study of theinterpretation mechanism of pun in advertising with Figure-Ground theory.This thesis contains five parts. The first part introduces the background,purpose and the whole organization of the study. The second part is the literaturereview. This part is mainly about the definition and classification of pun, the origin ofFigure-Ground theory as well as its segregation principle. Chapter three is the theorybasis, which contains the interpretation mechanism of the Figure-Ground theory andthe study method, namely, research questions, data collection and data presentation.Chapter four is the principal part of the whole thesis. This part analyzes therelationship between Figure-Ground theory and pun in advertising. Chapter five is theconclusion, which contains the study result, limitation and the suggestions for further study.On the basis of the present study, the author concludes that pun in advertisinghas three levels of Figure-Ground organization: the first level is the decompositionlevel, the relationship between advertising language and common language; thesecond level is the punning level, the relationship between pun in advertising and thecontext; the third level is the connection level, the relationship between advertisingmeaning and common meaning. Based on the audience’s previous understanding, thefirst level can activate the second level, and the ultimate meaning can be gainedthrough the connection level. From the point of audience, the interpretation level ofphonetic pun and semantic pun is the same. While the differences in language leads tosome differences. Phonetic pun can produce the completely different forms andmeanings, while semantic pun can create the languages with different meaning butwith the same form. Thus, semantic pun has more implication than phonetic pun.