A Comparative Study Of Chinese And American Advertising Language From The Perspective Of High And Low Context Theory

With the development of globalization and world integration, the communication between different countries in various fields is expanding. As an important part of culture, advertising gains more and more attention from scholars in different fields and countries. Therefore, the study of advertising has connection with several academic disciplines such as advertising, mass communication, intercultural communication, ethnology, sociology and linguistics. However, few studies on advertising language are conducted from high and low context perspective. Accordingly, this thesis is going to compare Chinese and American advertising language based on the high and low context theory.High context (HC) and low context (LC) theory is proposed by American anthropologist, Edward T. Hall, in his book Beyond Culture. He defines HC and LC according to the extent people rely on the context when they are communicating with each other. Although both HC and LC exist in almost every culture, different cultures have their own preferences to those two different contexts. China is one of the representatives of HC culture and its characteristic is that people tend to rely on the context in which they are engaged; much of the information is contained in the context and only a little needs to be expressed by language. So the communication between people is implicit and obscure. On the contrary, America is one of the representatives of LC culture. During the communication, people exchange information through explicitly coded language, and they pay less attention to the context. Therefore, the communication between people is direct and open. This difference must be reflected in their advertising language. Simply speaking, advertising language is the language used in advertising. It is the most basic and important expression form of advertising; it is a cross-disciplinary combination of pragmatics and sociolinguistics. To a great degree, it reflects the use of language in various aspects of social life. Due to the different ways of communication, the language used in Chinese and American advertising is sure to be different. The degree of contextual dependence will place an influence on advertising language.This thesis consists of five parts. The first part is an introduction, which briefly introduces the objectives, significance and methodology of this study. The second part is the literature review about advertising language as well as domestic and foreign studies of advertising language, which covers definition, characteristics and functions of advertising language and the studies conducted by scholars from different perspectives. The third part is the theoretical framework providing a theoretical foundation for the following parts. It includes definition of HC and LC, the characteristics of high context culture represented by China and the characteristics of low context culture represented by America. The fourth part is the main body of this thesis. This part compares Chinese and American advertising language from three perspectives:vocabulary, sentence structure, and rhetorical devices by providing a number of examples. The last part is the conclusion of this thesis. It concludes the major findings, the theoretical and practical implications and the limitations of this thesis, and the suggestions for future study.