Cyber Advertisements Of Luxuries: A Relevant-Adaptive Account Of Linguistic Features And Contextual Presumptions

With the development of science and technology,Internet has become the best platform for people to get fresh information.As a result cyber advertising appears,of which luxury cyber advertising language(LCAL)attracts a broad attention due to its fine language design.However,most of the studies in this field focus on the linguistic level;further studies are comparatively fewer of how the advertising language creates a peculiar linguistic context which drives the consumers to buy.Thus,this study analyzes these advertising texts from various luxury official websites as data to uncover the relationship between linguistic features and communicative contexts,namely,how the linguistic features are designed to create the context in which customers are encouraged to purchase by addressing the three research questions: 1.What are linguistic features of luxury cyber advertising language? 2.What are contextual correlates constructed based on these linguistic features? 3.How do these linguistic features and contextual correlates inter-adapt so as to meet consumers' various psychological appeals and drive them to buy?This study is theoretically informed and evidence-grounded.The theoretical framework of this thesis is Relevance-Adaptation Model(R-A model)developed from Relevance Theory and Adaptation Theory.A combination of quantitative and qualitative method is employed.The research procedures are: first,with the help of Antc.3.4.0,this thesis analyzes the tagged data by CLWAS7 to summarize its linguistic features;and then it observes and summarizes the contextual correlates of advertisements based on linguistic features under R-A model;finally,the thesis continues to work on the relationship between linguistic features and contextual correlates according to the results obtained above to find how they adapt to each other under this model.Major findings are: 1.O f the linguistic features,at the lexical level,the common words with less difficulties and shorter length are widely used;the use of word classes are relatively richer with more content words applied.At the syntactic level,simple sentences and minor sentences are widely used;the present tense declarative sentences with active voice are used mostly.At the semantic level,modal verbs indicating the possibility and ability,and conjunctions showing logical order are applied.The findings show that the luxury cyber advertising language is relatively simple and direct,whose main function is to convey product information and attract consumers.And these linguistic features construct various contexts to adapt concrete contexts of consumers.2.Advertisers make assumptions and adaptation to the specific contexts of consumers from the mental world,social world and physical world.Each luxury cyber advertising language constructs several contexts to meet different psychological appeals of consumers.And mental world is the most important,followed by social world.3.Based on above mentioned two parts,advertisers mainly employ simple verbs,commendatory adjectives,numerals,pronouns,foreign words and so on to adapt consumers' contexts.Those findings are hoped to deepen our understanding of LCAL and give useful enlightenment to create better advertisements in the future.