Exploration Of Grammatical Cohesion In Print Advertising English

Advertising might be one of the things people are most exposed to in modern life. Language is the important carrier of advertising, for which language in advertising has attracted wide attention in the linguistic field. A few researchers have studied advertising language from various perspectives. The main figures are: T. Vestergaard & K. Schr?der (1985), Guy Cook (1992), Tanaka Keico (1994), Angela Goddard (1998) and Huang Guowen (2001). They discussed the structural and rhetorical features of advertising language and functions of non-verbal elements of ads, such as picture and sound, from perspectives like sociolinguistics, pragmatics and functional grammar. The author finds study concerning cohesion in advertising language is quite rare. Guy Cook (1992) and Huang Guowen (2001) give a glimpse of cohesion of advertising language in their works, in a general and non-systematic way. This thesis is oriented to study the grammatical cohesion in print advertising English. Most of previous studies on advertising language focus on language itself. However, the author thinks the picture is an inseparable part of a print advertisement, thus is a part of the advertising discourse. As the non-linguistic communication form, it interacts with the verbal text in advertising discourse. The study of print advertising discourse requires consideration of the pictures.The author studied and summarized the research findings concerning advertising, and cohesion and coherence, on which she bases her study of reference, substitution/ellipsis and conjunction in print advertising discourse. The author selected 40 advertisements from three kinds US or UK magazines and newspaper and sorted them into 4 groups: food, drug (including cosmetics), service and car, 10 for each group. Through quantitative study of reference, substitution/ellipsis and conjunction in the samples, the author got the following results: 1) The number of exophoric references far exceeds that of endophoric ones in the samples. Second person references are used most frequently. Exophoric references function to link the verbal text and the non-verbal text of advertising discourse. Comparative references in advertising discourse often omit the referent. 2) The samples contain large amount of ellipses, of which clausal ones count for the largest percentage. 3) Conjunction occurs widely in the samples, but with a small quantity. Of the four types of conjunction, the additive is the most frequent one and the causal is the second. However, there are many implicit conjunctions found in the samples. Based on the analysis results, the author discusses the contribution of the above-mentioned cohesive features to cohesion and coherence of print advertising discourse, with consideration of the purpose and structure of advertising.The limitations of the current study lie in the following aspects: 1) The quantity of samples is relatively small. Compared with samples used in studies conducted by some western linguistics, it is not so sufficient. 2) The samples are selected from limited sources with a small variety. 3) The author focuses on print advertising, thus ignores the cohesive function of spoken aspects of language, such as speech and intonation. 4) The current study remains one on the surface level. There is much left to be further explored to find the deeper mechanism of grammatical cohesion in print advertising discourse.