An Analysis Of Public Service Advertising Language In China From Adaptation Theory Of Linguistics

Adaptation Theory, which regards pragmatics as a general cognitive, social, and cultural perspective on language, has been accepted and adopted by many researchers to analyze advertising language. Public service advertisements(PSAs), as a special kind of linguistic communication in public social life, play an increasing role in spite of their non-profitable features. However, less studies were carried out on PSAs compared with the researches on commercial advertisements. Based on Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory, this thesis aims to analyze and discuss how language in Chinese public service advertising text are utilized to adapt to the ingredients of communicative context, which include mental word, social world, and physical world, so as to find out what aspects of each world are to be adapted in order to achieve the advertising purpose of public service advertisement(PSA). Thereby, two research questions are put forward: 1. How are language in PSA text used to achieve different adaptations to the communicative context? 2. What variations and adjustments can be found in Chinese PSA’s adaptations from the year of 2009 to March, 2015?Since PSAs published from 2009 to March, 2015 are all taken into consideration and collected as the research data, this thesis initiates the analysis of the variations and adjustments in the PSAs’ adaptations and the reasons for the adjustments during these seven years in particular. PSA language is analyzed in quantitative, qualitative and case-study methods, and it can be concluded that Adaptation Theory can offer a reasonable explanation for the PSA language choice and use.The major findings of this thesis can be summarized as follows: first, the PSA language is carefully chosen through much effort to identify the main factors of mental, social and physical worlds, and proper pragmatic strategies are used to make adaptations to the three worlds accordingly. Second, it is founded that both the amount and the adapting factors of PSAs increases sharply from 2012 on after the analysis of the different categories of the selected video PSAs according to their publication year and the aspects they have adapted. Such aspects as traditional virtues, friendship, and freedom are frequently adapted to the mental, social, and physical worlds, while other aspects such as equality, justice, and rule of law are seldom touched upon in the adaptation. The reasons behind the adjustments are closely related to the proposal of Core Socialist Values and China Dream in China and the conflict of various cultures in the international situation.It is expected that this research will provide some insights for the future study of PSAs and also for a better understanding of Chinese PSAs.