A Study On Commercial Advertising Discourse From The Perspective Of Speech Act Theory

Advertising is ubiquitous in modern times, and becoming a part of our life. Advertising language, as a persuasive style, has formed unique linguistic characteristics in its development. Many scholars at home and abroad have done some research on advertising language from disparate perspectives. But most of these studies focus on the description of a certain language feature (rhetoric devices, presupposition, vocabulary, translation strategies etc.), which means those studies have not taken the advertising discourse as a whole into discussion. The studies based on cooperative principle and relevance theory can explain the conversational implicature of advertising, but they ignore the internal structure of advertising discourse. Most of the studies from the cognitive perspective focus on the re-interpretation of the rhetorical devices. The above studies are rarely involved in the analysis of newspaper advertising discourse. A few studies on advertising discourse based on Austinian tripartite typology cannot reveal the internal structure of advertising discourse either. Therefore, the thesis, taking Serale's speech act theory as the theoretical framework, aims to reveal the internal expression pattern of commercial advertising discourse, and to comprehend how commercial advertising constructs discourses for the purpose of persuasion.The thesis collects 243 pieces of commercial advertising discourse selected from Changsha Evening News during the period of June 1st,2015 to November 30th, 2015. Through qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis, the thesis studies the expression pattern of speech act in 243 advertisements. The two questions are:(1) What kinds of expression patterns of speech acts are adopted in advertising discourses? Which pattern or patterns'frequencies are relatively high? (2) Why are certain expression patterns more frequently used?Firstly, the classification of speech act by Searle, namely assertives, directives, commissives, expressives and declaratives, is referenced to decide which speech act each sentence in every advertisement belongs to. Then, twenty types of expression patterns of speech act are grouped in the light of sequence of speech acts appearing in each advertisement. Besides, the frequencies of these twenty kinds of expression pattern are calculated. Among them, "assertive+commissives" (A+C), "assertives" (A) and "assertive+commissives+directives" (A+C+D) get a relatively high frequency, accounting for 49.79%,24.28%,10.29% respectively. Lastly, reasons are explored for their high frequency based on speech act theory.The study of expression pattern of speech acts by dint of speech act theory not only broadens the research scope of speech act theory and provides the research of advertising language with a new perspective, but also provides beneficial reference for ad creators.