A Tentative Contrastive Study On Speech Act Metonymy In English And Chinese Advertisements

Commercial ad is a primary type of ads, whose objective is to persuade the consumers to experience or to buy the advertised product. In order to achieve this goal, the advertisers will adopt various types of utterances. Therefore the advertisers’ production of ads and the readers’interpretation seem rather important. To facilitate the ads production and interpretation, the present thesis is going to do a tentative contrastive study on the use of speech act metonymy between Chinese and English ads based on Panther and Thornburg’s Scenario Theory. The main objective of this study is to find out the similarities and differences in the use of speech act metonymy between Chinese and English ads and discuss the possible reasons which cause the similarities and differences.The author collected 120 items of Chinese ads and English ads each randomly from the available newspapers, magazines and the internet. All of the collected ads are classified into several components according to scenario approach. The frequencies of each component in Chinese and English ads are obtained by calculation and the significant value of difference between components is achieved by Chi-square test.This thesis first reviews the previous studies on ads from various perspectives and concludes the limitations of the previous studies, based on which the author states the significance of the present study. Then some important theories necessary for this study are briefly introduced, including Scenario Theory, Searle’s Speech Act Theory, and Brown and Levinson’s FTA theory. The author classifies the collected ads with the Ad Scenario adapted from the Request Scenario by Panther and Thornburg. The frequencies of different components are computed manually. The results show that BEFORE components occur most frequently and the CORE components occur least frequently both in Chinese and English ads. A major difference is that the CORE components in Chinese ads are less than those in English. The author attempts to explore the reasons causing the mentioned similarities and differences and arrives at a conclusion about the fundamental reason for the similarities that politeness purposes play a decisive role in the choice of component parts in both Chinese and English ads and that for the difference is probably different attitude toward conflict between Chinese and Western cultures. The author also compares the working mechanisms in interpreting indirect speech act between Scenario Theory and Searle’s speech act theory, and finds the former more powerful in interpreting than the latter.