A Study Of The Foregrounding In The English Enterprise Slogans

Nowadays, with the rapid development of economic globalization and information technology, as an important part of enterprise culture, enterprise slogan provides a way to display its image, create its culture and to improve its competitiveness. It also offers a lot of resources for enterprises to communicate with each other.This thesis takes the slogans of the recent years from most top500enterprises at home and abroad as the study objects and conducts the study within the frame of the foregrounding theory. The author adopts the qualitative approach and quantitative approach, and with statistics, finds that the semantic deviation is adopted most frequently, it can achieve a foregrounding effect through the use of some rhetorical devices, such as simile, metaphor, personification, pun and so on. It can make the sentence more vivid and elegant. The second influential form of foregrounding used in the enterprise slogans is lexical deviation with which the enterprise slogans are made more brief and easy to remember. The third one with a high frequency is syntactical deviation which are also catchy and able to arouse people’s interest. People will always think about what is the implied meaning of the slogans. Phonological overregularity, lexical overregularity and syntactical overregularity can also achieve a wonderful effect in the slogans. All of these three are impressive and demonstrate the image of the enterprises. And the last one is register deviation, it appears seldomly in the enterprise slogans. The author did not include the graphological deviation in the statistic analysis for convenience. However, it is a common feature and an important form of foregrounding in the enterprise slogans. The author also analyzes the main features of the enterprises slogans reflected by the foregrounding devises. They are simplicity, novelty, expressivity, and authority.To research on the enterprise slogans not only can help to understand the developmental orientation and the competitive priority of the enterprise, but also can make people pay more attention to how to structure the most attractive enterprise slogans to make the enterprise more competitive.