A Contrastive Study On Chinese And English Public Service Advertisements

Public service advertisements (PSAs for short) are a recent-developed kind of practical writing style in China, which involve the concept of public interest and behavior of the whole society, as well as every social member. Besides, they are also of great significance in building the socialist spiritual civilization and establish the good code of ethics. Accordingly, there are both realistic significance and practical value to study PSAs. Chinese's present researches on PSAs mostly start with the phenomenon of advertising language, and then summarize the linguistic features of advertising creation through a large number of case-analyses. Such summarizing studies are certainly useful and essential to the subject construction, but of relatively weak guiding significance to advertising creativity, which requests inspiration and wisdom to survive. In fact, what concerns the PSAs creators most is how to make the PSAs fully convey their information while being totally understood by the audience, so as to realize the public interest and achieve the goal of education. These two questions can find their answers from relevance theory.This thesis deals with the contrastive study on Chinese and English PSAs under relevance theory. The introduction part presents the motivation and significance of this research, how to collect data and do the research. Chapter one offers a detailed review about the researches on relevance theory and PSAs, and the summary of the author. Chapter two is the introduction of the concrete relevance theory which will be applied in this study. Chapter three will practically analyze Chinese and English PSA-samples under the theory introduced in chapter two, and find out the reasons behind the contrastive results. Chapter four will discuss the implications and limitations of this study. The conclusion chapter will display the major findings of this thesis.The author will select 150 pieces of English PSAs and 150 pieces of Chinese ones from magazines, televisions, and internet. To ensure the authority of the corpus, the magazines, televisions and internet are only the authentic ones, such as China Daily, CCTV, Public Interest—Ads of the Worlds, etc. The standards of corpus selecting on cover all aspects of people's lives, such as traffic safety, environment protection, anti-wars, etc., and represent the present characteristics of PSAs, such as 2008 Olympic Games, caring about AIDS suffers, etc. This thesis will make specific description and analysis on the selected corpus, and then draw the conclusion based on integrating the analyzed results.Whether the reason that no scholars center on this field is because relevance theory can't be applied in contrasting Chinese and English PSAs? Are there any similarities or differences between Chinese and English PSAs from the cognitive perspective? This thesis will do the first attempt and get the answer, which is also the innovation of this thesis. It might contribute to the development of Chinese PSAs, and the practical application of relevance theory.