An Analysis Of English Ads In The Semantic Approach

Advertising, which is from a Latin word"Advertere", means"to catch people's attention". In our information era, it is not only a necessary instrument of propaganda, but also an important channel for people to receive outdoor information and experience commercial life. No matter whether we walk on street or stay at home, advertising would appear in our eyes, affect our ideas and even change our shopping decisions through various kinds of advertising forms. We can classify the advertising into two categories:"commercial advertising"and"public service advertising"according to different contents. Although the two categories have different forms, their aims are the same. Just as AMA (American Marketing Association) concludes: give customers information, make customers understand and persuade customers to take action finally.In the new century, the entering of foreign language advertising, especially English advertising, adds new contents to the advertising languages. Those kinds of advertising express ideas in original languages, carry strong foreign styles and face different language receivers in different countries. The fascination of English advertising is to transmit its special information, connotation and even emotion to foreigners. Talented advertisers can express abundant information of products through emotional language. Successful advertising can impress customers deeply with its well-designed language content, abundant emotions and active images. On the contrary, unsuccessful advertising will give customers negative feelings, with inexact words, extreme exaggeration or farfetched contexts, which are beyond advertisers'aims. So it is worthwhile to analyze the advertising words semantically.Semantics is a kind of science that studies"the meanings of language". In 1970s, the British linguist Geoffrey Leech divided the meanings of language into seven parts in his famous work Semantics. These seven meanings appear and function respectively in different language contexts. Based on this theory, this paper tries to study the skills of advertising writing and to explore the special value of appropriate advertising words in the process of company image building and extra profit adding.This paper is devoted to the semantic analysis of advertising English and divided into five parts:Chapter One is an introduction to the paper. It reviews the previous domestic and foreign researchers'outcome in advertising language research and points out the theme of the paper------semantic analysis of English advertising.Chapter Two gives a general introduction to semantic theory, which contains the definition, the content and the application of the theory in life.Chapter Three is a brief introduction to advertising. It involves the definition, the functions and the classification of advertising.Chapter Four is the main part of this paper, which gives a focus on the language characters of advertising, the relationships between the conceptual meaning and brand name choice, the associative meaning and advertising words writing, the thematic meaning and advertising context arrangement.Chapter Five is the conclusion of the paper. The author summarizes the whole paper, points out some limitations and puts forward some new enlightenment on the further research.The semantic analysis of advertising can not only strengthen readers'theoretical understanding in semantics, but also have some important value in social and cultural research. It can not only give readers a new semantic approach in advertising language research, but also reflect the effects of different cultural values on people's life. Above all, it can enrich readers with some new skills in language application in the process of advertising appreciation.