A Study On Foregrounding In English Cosmetic Advertising

Many scholars have studied advertising language from different linguistic aspects. However, most researchers are committed to summarizing the general features of advertising language, generally from lexicon, syntax and grammar aspects, or to describe common rhetorical devices in advertising language in order to make it a kind of practical style.A linguistic foregrounding refers to a certain linguistic feature that stands out from the background through the way of breaking the accepted linguistic rules or enforcing the rule by repetition or parallelism. This study tries to explore the practicability of foregrounding theory in cosmetic advertising, to expand the application domain of the foregrounding theory and to provide new perspective for composing and studying cosmetic advertising.To be more specific, this study tries to show and analyze the stylistic features of cosmetic advertising language on the basis of foregrounding theory in stylistics. Two methods to realize foregrounding theory will be analyzed, namely qualitative foregrounding and quantitative foregrounding.Consequently, the following two questions will be addressed:(1) How is qualitative foregrounding realized in cosmetic advertising?(2) How is quantitative foregrounding realized in cosmetic advertising?475pieces of cosmetic advertising (only404pieces are valid) are selected from magazines, newspapers and website from2008to2013. After analyzing those collected data, we find that:qualitative foregrounding is mainly reflected by deviation, including lexical deviation (which is mainly reflected by neologism, conversion of word classes, borrowing and special usage), semantic deviation (which is mainly reflected by metaphor, parody, personification, hyperbole and understatement), grammatical deviation (which is mainly reflected by elliptical sentences, negative sentences and conditional sentences), and graphological deviation (which is mainly reflected by punctuation, type setting, spelling, capitalization, italicizing and underline), and graphological deviation highlights most; quantitative foregrounding is mainly realized by overregularity, including phonological overregularity (which is mainly reflected by alliteration and rhyme) and syntactical overregularity (which is mainly reflected by parallelism and antithesis).This study is intended to help consumers better understand the connotations of cosmetic advertising and advertisers better create cosmetic advertisings in the future; and to provide a new perspective for analyzing cosmetic advertising.