Study On Pun Application In Chinese Advertisements From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

For a long time puns are widely used in modern advertising communication and the studies of puns have also involved almost all the aspects of language. However, most of the researches in the past only concerned advertisement itself and ignored the audiences’ interaction process. There are few explanations about the cognitive process of generating and interpreting advertising puns, especially the Chinese puns.The present study tries to analyze puns used in Chinese advertising as a special language phenomenon according to D. Sperber and D. Wilson’s Relevance Theory by means of statistic and case study. A distinction is made between puns in which two interpretations are relevant to the advertisers’intentional massage and puns in which only one interpretation is relevant. This paper reports tries to find out whether advertisements containing a pun in general are more appreciated than those without a pun, and also whether advertisements containing a pun with two or more relevant interpretations more appreciated than advertisements containing a pun with only one relevant interpretation.A total of172Chinese advertisements containing a pun are collected and clarified first to study the distribution pattern. Furthermore, Questionnaires are designed as complementary means to explore the different effectiveness of different kinds of puns. Sixty-three participants rate their appreciation of the advertisements from three aspects. In order to avoid gender difference towards different types of products, the author revises the Personal Involvement Inventory (PII) to test their advertising involvement. Results show that electronic products, medicine, insurance and consulting are the three highly involved advertisements for boys, and cosmetics and medicine advertisements are of high-involvement for girls. Next, based on those highly involved advertisements, two questionnaires are designed to explore the effectiveness of the three kinds of Chinese advertisements (one is for girls while the other is for boys). The participants are asked to judge each advertisement on individual Likert sacles from three aspects including interestingness, impression and favor. The results are analyzed by statistic means. With regard to the questionnaires collected, Reliability test is firstly employed to examine whether items used in the questionnaires are reliable and then Independent Sample Test is used to analyze whether there is significant difference in comprehension for the three advertising types. After the data processing, the author analyzes some cases to discuss the interpreting process of advertising puns based on Relevance Theory.Results of the study manifest that the presence or absence of puns has a significant impact on the audience’s appreciation. And also, advertisements containing a pun are more effective than advertisements without a pun which means that puns play a significant role in Chinese advertising. Moreover, puns with two or more relevant interpretations are regarded more interesting and favored than advertisements containing a pun with only one relevant interpretation, but the later are considered more impressive than the former.Findings of the present study further illustrate the great explanatory power of the Relevance Theory for puns. Furthermore, the present study can also help the audience enrich their understanding of puns and help the advertisers make better application of puns in their advertisements design to make advertising communication more efficient.