A Contrastive Study Of Pun In English And Chinese Advertisement

Language of advertisements should not only be brief, but innovative and creative as well. Due to the nature of the rhetoric of pun, from both the perspectives of phonetics and pragmatics, advertisement language can lead to two different meanings:superficial and implied meanings. Also, due to the associative meaning of pun, it can make the advertising products more publicized; therefore pun usages are widely used in both English and Chinese advertisements.This thesis analyzes the pun usages of English and Chinese advertisements and summarizes the distinctive features of them. It applies the similar pronunciation of words and phrases to create homophonic pun and it draws people's attention by creating ambiguous meaning. Words with two or more possible meanings that lead to a semantic pun, which can provide more information can be connected with the products and services. In addition, it applies grammatical pun through using dual or multiple grammatical function of the same specific word, which raises people's interests. Meanwhile, it uses some familiar idioms and vulgarisms to create idiomatical pun, which gives the target audience a deeper impression of the products.Through analyzing different pun usages of advertisements, this thesis makes a summary of obvious effects of English and Chinese advertisements and it interprets the achievements of pun effect of English and Chinese advertisements. It has the following obvious effects; economic effect, brand publicizing, shared feelings and avoiding taboos. The achievement of the pun effect needs the associated effort of both the makers and consumers of advertisements.Based on similar usages of different kinds of pun in English and Chinese advertisements, it discusses discrepancy among the usages of homophonic pun, semantic pun and idiomatical pun. In addition, it investigates the causes of differences from the perspective of speech sounds of English and Chinese and the feature of construction of semantics. In homophonic pun, English advertisements adopt many similar pronunciation words because of the lack of similar pronunciation of English words, on the contrary, Chinese advertisements applies many similar pronunciation words. In semantic pun, because there are many polysemy words exist in English words, therefore, semantic pun usages are most widely used in English advertisements and it is not restricted in dual meanings. In idiomatical pun, Chinese advertisements commonly use this rhetoric method and it includes semantic pun and homophonic pun, which cause the phenomenon of pun overlap. However, English Advertisements only include semantic pun. At the same time, the usage of pun is based on specific cultural background, which provides advertisement makers with different language source material.