An Adaptation-Relevance Study Of Advertising Language

Penetrating into every aspect of human life, advertisements have become one indispensable part of daily human life. Advertising language is the most important carrier of information in an advertisement, also the core of the advertising phenomenon. Nowadays linguists are paying more attention to the importance of advertising in linguistic study. Scholars have studied advertising language from the semiotic approach, the discourse approach, and the semantic approach. They have made great contributions in the study of advertising language. But their studies have some demerits. They have not considered the psychology of the audience and the interadaptation during the communication of the production and interpretation of advertising language in their studies.Based on Relevance Theory, which is proposed by Sperber and Wilson (1986, 1995, 2001) and Adaptation Theory, which is initiated and elaborated by Verschueren (1999,2000), Adaptation-Relevance Model is proposed by integrating the two influential theories together. The model holds that communication process as a process of linguistic choice is an adaptation process to the contextual correlates for the seeking of optimal relevance. The main claims of this model can be manifested as:First, the purpose of communication for both speaker and hearer is to seek optimal relevance. Since human's cognition is relevance-oriented, people will pay attention to the phenomenon which seems to be relevant to them. Every act of ostensive communication communicates the presumption of its own optimal relevance.Second, the process of adaptation-relevance is a dynamic interadaptation between linguistic forms and contextual correlates. The purpose of this interadaptation is to seek optimal relevance. The contextual correlates include the social world, mental world and physical world.Third, the communicator's presumption of relevance decides his choice of a particular utterance. The presumption of relevance is made during the process of adaptation, and it is the product of adapting his linguistic behavior to those contextual correlates consistent with the principle of relevance.Finally, the process of adaptation-relevance involves choosing strategies. Speakers choose not only forms but also strategies. Two kinds of strategies, persuasion strategy and attention-attracting strategy, are often employed in advertising language.The present thesis approaches advertising language pragmatically. Within the theoretical framework of Adaptation-Relevance Model, the study selects both Chinese and English advertising language as the researching materials and examines them mainly along the contextual correlates of adaptation in advertising language with relevance orientation. The study makes its own contribution to the systematic study on advertising communication. And the construction of the model can serve as the guidance to improve people's understanding in the advertising communication, and shed light on the study of other linguistic phenomena.