An Analysis Of Puns In Advertisements From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

In a great many ways of human communication, advertising plays a crucial role in our life, more andmore scholars are about to pay attention to advertising language. At the same time, in our daily life, thereare more and more people interested in advertising, because advertisements are nearly flooded in everycorner of our life. Though the content of numerous advertisements is varied, the ways in which they conveyinformation are nearly the same. They always express their intention or purpose in an implicit way, andpunning is just one of the means they often employ. Punning is a type of common rhetorical device. It canexpress multiple meanings with only one word or phrase. Employing punning appropriately can make thelanguage impressive and humorous; it can also reinforce the linguistic meaning and leave a deepimpression on people. However, as the competition is so intense nowadays in the advertising market, theadvertisers will try by every means to make their products optimal. So, they take much fancy to punning, aspunning can convey information much more effectively to the audiences within the limited space and time,and then accelerate the successful communication between the advertisers and the audiences, in the endpersuade the audiences to take purchase action. Thus, the advertisers can gain profits.Based on the relevance theory proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, the present paper makesan analysis of the linguistic properties of advertising language. With the help of some case studies, thethesis tries to address the following questions:â'ˆWhy does an advertiser prefer puns in advertisements though puns contain ambiguity?â'‰How can punning be realized in advertisements?â'ŠHow does an advertiser use puns in advertisements to successfully communicate with theaudiences?By applying Relevance Theory, the author hopes:â'ˆTo find out the reason why the advertisers preferpuns in advertisements.â'‰To find the ways of punning realization in advertising.â'ŠTo find the reasonswhy puns in advertisements can make the communication between the advertiser and the audience go onsuccessfully. The data collected are mostly from the commercial advertisements scattered in English books,magazines, newspapers, TV advertisements and so on. Case study of each advertisement utilizing puns is adopted in the paper, on the basis of which the research concludes that it is the relevance, either phonetic orsemantic, between the puns in the advertisements and the actual situation that make puns welcome to boththe advertiser and the audience, and it is due to such advantages of puns that the communication betweenthe advertiser and the audience goes smoothly and successfully.This thesis is divided into five chapters.Chapter One is a brief introduction of the present study, dealing with research background, researchsignificance, research objectives as well as the structure of the thesis.Chapter Two is the literature review, in which the author mainly describes the essentials of theRelevance Theory, the theoretical basis of the present research, and the previous studies on puns both athome and abroad.Chapter Three is the research design of this thesis, mainly covering research questions, researchmethodology, procedures and data collection.Chapter Four is the data analysis and discussion, which is the main part of the paper. It is the concreteanalysis of puns in advertisements.Chapter Five draws a conclusion of the research, which includes the major findings of the thesis andremaining problems for further study.