The Study Of Advertising Language From The Perspective Of Memetic-adaptation

In daily life, advertisements that can be seen almost everywhere areunconsciously influencing people’s lives. Meanwhile, advertising is also influencingconsumers, attitudes or values through TV, internet, newspaper，magazines and othermedia. Any advertisement is to use the language to show its theme and set up thecommunication bridge between goods and consumers. Therefore, advertisinglanguage has attracted many scholars to study it from different angles. They havemade great achievements. Based on the previous studies, the present study will studyadvertising language from the point of view of memetics. Memetics is a new theory tostudy cultural revolution. Since it is proposed, it has been widely applied to sociology,culture, psychology, linguistics and other disciplines.Language is the carrier of culture and is also a part of culture. The famousscholar He Ziran has proposed that language is meme. So from this perspective,advertising language is a kind of meme. According to Heylighen, a meme should gothrough four stages to pass the replication during which memes must meet certainstandards to be successfully replicated. Then how can a certain advertising languagememe stand out of so much advertising language memes? The author thinks that theadvertising language memes have satisfied certain selection criteria. According toanalysis, the author thinks that advertising language memes should meet the criteria ofsimplicity, novelty, coherence, authority and conformity. While the criteria can also beseen as the properties of advertising language. The present study tries to justify thosecriteria on the basis of adaptation theory. According to adaptation theory, advertisingas a kind of communicative activities, advertising language should be chose.Advertising as a one-way communication activity should adapt to the communicative context (the mental world, the social world and the physical world). Thecommunicative context can be seen as the living environment of advertising languagememes.The author finally gets the conclusion through analysis that successfuladvertising language meme is influenced by the cognitive factor and emotive factor inthe mental world and the cultural factor in the social world. Advertising languagememes adapts to the two worlds. Novelty, simplicity and coherence are the adaptationto the cognitive factor in the mental world; authority is the adaptation to the emotivefactor in the mental world; conformity is the adaptation to the culture factor in thesocial world.This paper studies advertising language from a new angle of memetics andenhances the persuasion of memetics. In addition, through analysis the author hopesthat this paper can make people better understand and appreciate advertising languagefrom the perspective of meme replication and transmission. Finally, this paper canhelp advertisers consider the meme，s adaptation to the mental world and social worldin creating advertisements in order to create more outstanding advertising language.