A Case Study Of Pragmatic Strategies In English Cosmetic Advertisements From The Perspective Of Contextual Adaptation Theory

Nowadays, advertising has infiltrated in every corner of our social life. Therefore,researches on advertising have been carried out from various perspectives. This thesisfocuses on the application of pragmatic strategies in English cosmetic advertisementsguided by Verschueren’s Contextual Adaptation Theory. It is a qualitative study, andthe data mainly collected from magazines, internet etc. The main purpose of this studyis to gain a deeper understanding of linguistic phenomena in English cosmeticadvertisements and to enhance the awareness that language use is a constant processof adaptation. Besides, hopefully the patterns of pragmatic strategy choices can serveas a reference to other pragmatic practices in advertisement language use.Adaptation Theory proposed by Verschueren(2000) provides a pragmaticperspective in the study of language use and points out that language use is a processof language choice. This process of choice is made possible because of threecharacteristics of language, namely: variability, negotiability and adaptability. Thechoice of language can be investigated from four angles: contextual correlates ofadaptability, objects of adaptability, dynamics of adaptability, and salience ofadaptation process. These four angles are integrated in pragmatic methodology.Among them, context correlates are the focus of the analysis in this thesis. This paperanalyzes adaptation made in English cosmetic advertisements according to contextualcorrelates: the mental world, the social world and the physical world.This thesis is divided into five parts. They are sequentially the introduction,literature review, the theoretical framework for this thesis, an analysis of pragmaticstrategies in English cosmetic advertisements from the perspective of adaptation incontext and the conclusion. Some inductive research findings have been discovered inthis thesis: Correctly applying the Adaptation Theory and making adaptations to thelanguage users’ mental world, social world, and physical world could achievepromotional effects. As for the adaptation to the mental world, descriptive adjectives,vague claims and figure of speech are commonly used by advertisers. The socialworld mainly includes social and culture factors. The adaptation to physical world isanalyzed from two aspects: temporal reference and spatial reference.