A Relevance Approach To Verbal Irony In Chinese Advertisements

With the rapid development of commodity economy and information technology, advertisements have become a part of our daily life. Advertisements with verbal irony are prominent among various kinds of advertisements due to their distinctive features and practical pragmatic functions and effects, and have being received much attention from scholars. However, there exist two limitations in previous studies at home and abroad on irony in advertisements: first, most of them are developed from a single perspective of advertisers’ creating reasons or consumers’ understanding, thus lacking an united interpretation of irony in advertisements from its creation to the comprehension; second, most of previous studies focus on irony’s pragmatic functions of expressing humor, sarcasm, criticism, expectation, politeness, but the pragmatic function of expressing compliment is rarely mentioned and analyzed.From a cognitive perspective, the thesis aims to prob into systematically the generation and comprehension of verbal irony in Chinese advertisements. And the thesis, mainly adopting an analysis method, tries to analyze and explain some instances of Chinese advertisements with verbal irony, based on important concepts in Relevance Theory, such as optimal relevance, maximal relevance, ostensive-referential communication and cognitive environment.In this thesis, we have tried to answer the following two questions based on Relevance Theory:(1) What are the generative motivation and generative process of verbal irony in Chinese advertisements?(2) How do people comprehend verbal irony in Chinese advertisements successfully? The findings of the study are shown as follows:(1) The generative motivation of employing verbal irony in Chinese advertisements is attributed to their distinctive characteristics and pragmatic effects, especially to the complimentary meaning it expresses first. And then the creation of semantic inconsistency through an integration of cognitive environment is the core of designing Chinese advertisements with verbal irony.(2) The comprehension falls into two steps: first, the identification of semantic inconsistency of verbal irony in Chinese advertisements between literal meaning and intended meaning based on cognitive environment; second, the comprehension of verbal irony’s complimentary meaning in Chinese advertisements, which can be described simply as that the literal meaning works as an ostensive stimulus to attract consumers to infer the real intention and attitude of the advertisers, comprehend their complimentary meaning and appreciate the charm and beauty further. Cognitive environment is the factor which should be considered through the whole process from its generation to comprehension.We hope that what the thesis has done can popularize the application of Relevance Theory in linguistic study, and will be of some help to the later study of similar linguistic phenomena to some extent. In addition, it can exert some reference value to effective creation of advertisers, consumers’ complete understanding of advertisements with verbal irony and other related studies.