Parody In Advertisements And A Figure/ground-based Analysis

Parody, as a vivid rhetorical device to deliver the advertisers’ intention, is among theheated research subjects nowadays. The adoption of parody in advertisements is a clevermanipulation of linguistic creativities, bringing about incredible beauty of novelty andingenuity of language. Parody is a way of revealing the world in depth as people try tocreate something impressive and attract the audience’s attention as much as possible.Parody is psychologically or cognitively exquisite, so it is quite natural for us to study itfrom a cognitive perspective.The frequent use of parody has attracted the attention of many scholars. Althoughthere are fruitful achievements, there is much room for improvement. Chinese scholarshave been paying more attention to the researches of the parody from rhetorical,psychological, pragmatic and other perspectives and have made great contributions in thesedomains. Foreign studies, however, are not simply confined to linguistic field, butextended to the realms of literature, aesthetics, and so on.This thesis is concerned with parody in advertising language, aiming at interpretingparody in light of a cognitive model, i.e. Figure-ground Theory. The Figure-ground Theoryis a significant theory which is based on the prominence view in cognitive linguistics. Incognitive linguistics, Figure is a more prominent part in cognition, which is the focus ofattention, and more easily attracts people’s attention, while Ground is less prominent thanFigure in cognition and can be regarded as the reference of Figure in our cognition.This thesis is composed of seven parts, namely, introduction, literature review,Figure-ground Theory and its actualization in parody, features and production of successfulparody, a comparative study of Chinese and English parody advertisements,Figure-ground-based analysis of parody advertisements, and conclusion. The Chinese andEnglish advertisements analyzed in this thesis are almost all collected from the Chinesemagazine Duzhe (Readers) and the English magazine Reader’s Digest respectively fromJan.2003to Jan.2013. Through analyzing70advertisements, we conclude as follows: Firstly, we have specified three features of successful Chinese and English parodyadvertisements, which are concision and easiness for memorization, novelty and aestheticsense, and temporariness and transiency.Secondly, there are four production ways of parody expressions, namely substitution,rearrangement, integration and negation.Thirdly, a comparative study between Chinese and English parodies in advertisementshas been conducted. With this study, some similarities are discovered, which are: parodyfrom both Chinese and English advertisements can be classified into four types: wordparody, phrase parody, sentence parody and text parody. The differences include: as analphabetic language, English advertisements are rich in affixation parody words, which donot exist in Chinese. As Chinese belongs to tone language, the parody words of tonesimilarity are quite common in Chinese advertisements.Lastly, we find out that Figure plays two major functions: indicating brands or kinds,and emphasizing functions and effects. The functions of Ground are: strengthening thegood image and reversing the bad image.