| Commercial advertising is an important means of commodity promotion,and it is also a cultural phenomenon.On the one hand,commercial advertising can not only promote sales and guide consumption,it also spreads a certain ideology to the public and promotes the construction of social and spiritual civilization.On the other hand,with its concise and condensed characteristics,advertising slogans bring great benefits to advertisers and also leave a deep impression on people.Puns have been researched by a wide number of experts from a variety of views as the most prevalent rhetorical tool in advertising slogans because they can not only make advertising slogans have multiple contexts at the same time,but also attract people’s attention and stimulate consumers to buy products.This thesis collects 800 commercial advertising slogans in Chinese and English from Google,400 in each language,they were quantitatively analyzed using t-test and descriptive analysis,aiming to investigate the frequency of puns in Chinese and English advertisements and whether they are significantly different.At the same time,the qualitative analysis of puns in Chinese and English advertisements is conducted combining relevance theory with adaptation theory to explore the interpretation process of puns.This thesis attempts to answer the following questions: 1.What is the frequency and distribution characteristics of different types of puns in advertisements?2.Why puns are favored by advertisers? 3.How puns in Chinese and English advertisements adapt to linguistic structure and specific context?The thesis derives the following findings based on the analysis: in Chinese advertisements,the number of puns is larger than in English,as is the number of each type of pun,with semantic puns being used the most and grammatical puns being used the least.Besides,statistics and comparison of the frequency of different types of puns will help people better analyze the puns in commercial advertisements.Puns in Chinese and English advertisements are well-explained by relevance theory and adaptation theory.Relevance theory explains how the audiences get the optimal relevance when they are interpreting advertisements and how to interpret puns in different contexts;adaptation theory analyzes puns at both structural and contextual levels,in terms of structural adaptation,the author makes a detailed analysis of puns from phonology,lexicon and syntax,in terms of contextual adaptation,the author analyzes puns from three levels: mental world,social world and physical world.It is hoped that the research in this thesis will be useful to advertising designers and bring help to people’s understanding of advertising puns. |
