A Tentative Study Of Commercial Advertising Slogans From The Perspective Of Speech Act Theory

Advertisement is a form of communication in a special communication situationand language is the most important vehicle of communication. Though anadvertisement includes many elements, there is no doubt that language is the mostessential component. Generally speaking, advertisements are intended to publicize acertain merchandize or service or in essence to persuade consumers to make purchase,which is the basic function of advertising.The thesis has explained the basic function of advertising from the perspective ofSearle’s speech act theory which was originally formulated by J. L. Austin, whobelieved that people are performing three kinds of speech acts simultaneously whilespeaking, namely, locutionary act, illocutionary and perlocutionary and he classifiedillocutionary act into five taxonomies. J. R. Searle developed the theory by providingfelicity conditions for performing speech acts and he reclassified illocutionary act intofive taxonomies, namely, assertives, directives, commissives, expressives anddeclarations and he also proposed the notion of indirect speech act. It has also beenfound that with the employment of rhetorical devices, information conveyed byadvertising slogans becomes more and more indirect. J. R. Searle defines indirectnessof language as to perform indirectly one illocutionary act by means of performinganother and G. N. Leech has observed the relationship between indirectness andpoliteness.Mainly based on Searle’s speech act theory,350pieces of commercial advertisingslogans have been collected as object of analysis among which persuasive force ofsome representative slogans with speech act characteristics and figures of speech areanalyzed with qualitative method; meanwhile, the distribution of each speech actcharacteristics are calculated and reasons why such distribution occurs are explored.The findings of the analysis show that except declarative act, all the other four types ofspeech act are employed and more than one speech act is employed in some of theslogans which are classified into the type which is characterized by the more evidentspeech act. Assertives and expressives are employed more frequently among350commercial advertising slogans.To sum up, the thesis makes a tentative study of speech act characteristics of commercial advertising slogans from a new angle, attempts to provide a forcefulexplanation about the linguistic phenomenon and linguistic characteristics ofadvertising slogans and explores the theoretical value of advertising language. It ishoped that the thesis will help audiences and consumers better understand and useadvertisements and provide beneficial reference to ad writers.