A Study Of Parody Inadvertisements From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Nowadays, with the rapid development of mass media and the circulation need ofcommodities, advertising is not only approaching perfection day by day, but also closelyrelated to people's daily life. Whether ads can attract the readers lies in the fact whether theadvertising languages are vivid and interesting. As advertising is a special kind of languagecommunication between the advertisers and the audiences, which kinds of language can applyto advertisements becomes the key link in the process of advertising creation. So in order tomake the advertisements make a splash, the advertising copywriters pay their attention to theuse of advertising language and the most applied is rhetorical devices, such as pun,personification, repetition and so on. Meanwhile, parody is wildly used and playing a moreand more important role and attracts more attention of the advertising makers. Parody is apiece of writing intended to amuse by imitating the style of writing used by somebody else.According to Sperber and Wilson, language communication is a kind of cognitive activity,that is, it is an ostensive-inferential communication from the feature of information dealing.This thesis covers two factors which affect the degrees of relevance, that is, contextual effectand the processing effort. Besides, two principles of relevance of Relevance Theory- cognitiveprinciple and the communication principle will be introduced. In the light of Sperber andWilson, in the process of normal communication, the audiences always pursue the target ofoptimal relevance—using the least efforts to gain the maximal cognitive effect in the cognitiveprocess.Advertising is a special kind of language communication, and according to RelevanceTheory, advertising is a kind of ostensive-inferential process. So this thesis based on RelevanceTheory, aims to analyze how Relevnce Theory works in parodic advertisements. This thesisconsist of six parts and parody interpretation is the most important part. Through the analysisof some Chinese and English parodic advertisements, it illustrates the effects of ostension,inference and the two degrees of relevance-contextual effects and processing effort in theprocess of interpreting parodic advertisements. In the end, the problems existing in this studyand the need for further study will be inroduced.