A Study Of Phonetic Metaphor In English Commercial Advertising From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

With the rapid development of economy,advertising,as a means of communication,has become an important part of people’s daily life.Although advertising language is multifarious,the ultimate goal is to propagate products or services,stimulate consumers’ consumption desires and achieve the goal of selling products or services.Phonetic metaphor refers to “saying one domain(a kind of sound-semantic relationship)in terms of another(a kind of sound-semantic relationship)at the level of sound”.As a burgeoning rhetorical device and a kind of cognitive mode,it has become more favored by advertising designers.In recent years,although many experts and scholars have focused on the study of commercial advertising,most of their studies have been confined to the perspectives of structure,function,interpersonal meaning and so on.With the rapid development of pragmatics,some scholars attempt to study English advertisements from the perspective of relevance theory.Relevance theory accounts for human verbal communication from the aspects of linguistic philosophy,cognitive psychology,communication science and so on.It combines cognition with pragmatics,and has transferred the emphases of pragmatics research from utterance output to utterance understanding.Relevance theory not only services pragmatics,but also greatly enriches the theories of pragmatics.Through investigation and study,the author find that although the researches about phonetic metaphor in advertising can give a reference to future study of phonetic metaphor in English commercial advertising,these studies were mainly confined to the study of the communication process between advertisers and consumers.Moreover,they neither pointed out the features of phonetic metaphor in English commercial advertising nor exposed how audiences understand phonetic metaphor in English commercial advertising.Therefore,this thesis attempts to expound the features of phonetic metaphor in English commercial advertising and emphatically illustrates the consumer’s understanding process of phonetic metaphor in English commercial advertising under the guidance of relevance theory.This paper altogether collected 140 English commercial advertisements which contain phonetic metaphor from foreign English websites and classified them into product commercial advertisements and service commercial advertisements according to commercial purposes;meanwhile,the author further classified phonetic metaphors in the above two types of English commercial advertisements into three types.Taking relevance theory as the theoretical framework and adopting both taxonomy and quantitative analysis as the research methodology,this thesis attempts to use the three core concepts of relevance theory,namely: Ostensive-Inferential Communication,Cognitive Context and Optimal Relevance,to analyze such three types of phonetic metaphor,as perfect homonym,homophone and phonetic parody in English commercial advertising respectively.The following three questions are answered in this thesis:1)What are the typical features of phonetic metaphors in English Commercial Advertising?2)How to understand phonetic metaphors in English Commercial Advertising under the guidance of relevance theory?3)Which type of phonetic metaphor is frequently used in English Commercial Advertising? Why?Through the analysis,the author draws the following conclusions.Firstly,the frequency of perfect homonym far exceeds that of homophone and phonetic parody in English commercial advertisements;besides,no matter what kind of rhetorical device is employed by the advertiser to propagate products or services,the audience should combine the advertiser’s ostension with relevant cognitive context,and then process and infer the information to obtain the optimal relevance and understand the intended meaning of the advertisement.Meanwhile,to facilitate the understanding of phonetic metaphor in English commercial advertising,the author also analyzes the features of phonetic metaphor in English commercial advertising.This research proved that relevance theory can be used to understand phonetic metaphors in English commercial advertising.