A Study Of The Application Of Foregrounding In Advertising

It's hard to imagine what the world would be like without advertising in today's society.Businessmen sell their products through advertisements,and ordinary people get commodity information from advertisements and choose what they need.Indeed,advertising has played a vital role in the development of human society.It is precisely because of its importance that scholars in different fields have carried out extensive researches on advertising in order to make it serve human beings better.Investigations by linguists have found that the language of advertising is informal and colloquial which is distinct from that of literature.The purpose of this style of advertising language is to shorten the distance from the audience and make it more attractive.At this point,it is the same as literature because literature also attempts to make it easier for readers to understand and appreciate it through the use of various rhetorical devices which include Foregrounding Theory,the most powerful rhetorical device.It has been proven by previous studies and practice that foregrounding device is very useful to make advertising attractive.However,the application of foregrounding in advertising has not been studied extensively yet.A few published reports have merely studied the phenomenon of foregrounding in advertising and the suitableness for foregrounding theory in advertising.There is still a lack of systematic and in-depth research.The effect of the visual and auditory aspects on foregrounding has not been touched yet,and what issues should be noted in the application of foregrounding theory in advertising has not been studied either.In view of the existing problems and shortcomings in previous studies,this thesis mainly studies four questions as follows:(1)How is the qualitative foregrounding in advertising achieved by linguistic deviations?(2)How is the quantitative foregrounding in advertising realized by linguistic parallelism?(3)How is the foregrounding in advertising realized by non-verbal means?(4)What issues should be noted in the application of foregrounding theory in advertising?In this thesis,a corpus of 500 advertisements is compiled and about 100 representative samples is carefully selected from the corpus for research,and the linguistic Foregrounding Theory is taken as the theoretical framework.As for the first question,it mainly analyses the formation of foregrounding from deviations at five levels of advertising language,i.e.phonological,graphological,lexical,grammatical and semantic level.On the second question,it mainly studies the realization of foregrounding via linguistic parallelisms at four language levels,i.e.phonological,lexical,grammatical and semantic level.Regarding the third question,Foregrounding Theory is employed to analyze the realization of foregrounding through audiovisual means.And for the last question,according to the AIDA model,the maximum achievable foregrounding effect and the principle of information authenticity,it puts forward some noting points.This study has found that both qualitative foregrounding and quantitative foregrounding can be realized in advertising through the language deviation and parallelism at various language levels.In other words,foregrounding can be applied in various levels of the language of advertising as a very important practical tool to highlight features of products and enhance the attractiveness of advertising.The interaction of foregrounding produced by each device reaches the effect that the product on offer is the ultimate choice for the consumer's need.It has also found that not only can language produce foregrounding effect,but sound and images(audiovisual means)can also produce foregrounding effect.Furthermore,it has also found that when foregrounding theory is applied in advertising at least three issues should be paid attention to,namely,foregrounding should be AIDA centric,Foregrounding Theory should cooperate with audiovisual means and a moderate principle should be obeyed.In a word,this paper takes a large number of advertisements as examples,and takes Foregrounding Theory of linguistics as the framework,systematically studies the application of Foregrounding in advertising,and achieves meaningful results.This paper is not only a relatively systematic summary of Foregrounding Theory,but also a certain enrichment and development of the application of Foregrounding Theory.It can be used not only as a reference for understanding Foregrounding Theory,but also as an important reference for advertising workers.