Linguistic Adaptability In International Advertising

Numerous studies have focused on advertising in cultural and advertising fields and even in international academic exchange. This thesis adopts qualitative and quantitative approaches to probe into the issue from the pragmatic and global perspective, which is a new approach to the study of international advertising. It begins with the motivation and the significance of the study on the adaptability in the globalization and localization of international advertising from a linguistic perspective. After that, it makes a review of all kinds of approaches to the study of advertising and points out the limitations of the previous study. Since few studies have been conducted on the adaptability in the globalization and localization of international advertising, this thesis makes an attempt to fill the gap in this field.And then, this thesis expounds on the theoretical foundation of the thesis, namely the Linguistic Adaptation Theory put forward by Verschueren. He specified pragmatics as a general cognitive, social, and cultural perspective on linguistic phenomena in relation to their usage in forms of behavior. In this thesis, the author makes use of this theory, especially the contents of adaptability--contextual correlates of adaptability to analyze the adaptability in the globalization and localization of international advertising. In the contextual correlates of adaptability, there are four ingredients, namely, adaptation to language users, adaptation to mental world, adaptation to social world, and adaptation to physical world. For adaptation to mental world, the theory of hierarchy of needs is discussed, which is put forward by Maslow; in his opinion, the hierarchy of needs is safety, love, and self-actualizing, etc; for adaptation to social world, specifically speaking, that refers to the adaptation to social settings and institutions and social culture.Furthermore, within the theoretical framework of Linguistic Adaptation Theory, this thesis presents the case study of the ads from the China Advertising Net and the international advertising net, and gives a quantitative analysis of the adaptability in the globalization and localization of international advertising. It is found that both strategies of globalization and localization are applicable to the international advertising. But how to use the strategies depends on different language users, different social world, mental world and physical world. Accordingly some solutions are made for the adaptability in the globalization and localization of international advertising, which can hopefully serve the reference for the international ad makers and the related academic researchers.