An Analysis Of TV Advertising Lanaguage From The Perspective Of Graded Salience Hypothesis

TV advertisement is becoming an important way of culture transmission in our daily life. Good advertisements can leave deep impressions. One of the most important points in making a good advertisement lies in choosing and organizing the language. Recently, linguists have done mounts of research on such kind of data. Theories such as cooperative principle, rhetorical strategies, presupposition and relevance theory, adaptation theory and memetics have been applied to the analysis of advertising language.In this thesis, a new perspective-Graded Salience Hypothesis (GSH) is adopted to analyze TV advertising language. It aims at analyzing the GSH appliancation in advertising language through empirical research, and provides suggestions for the choice and organization of advertising language. GSH was proposed by Giora in 1997. It gives a new language comprehension model:the activation of a word's meaning is determined by its salience degree; the more salient it is, the easier it is to be retrieved from the mental lexicon. The salience degree of a meaning is affected by four factors: conventionality, familiarity, frequency and prototypicality. The salience degree has a positive relation with all the four factors. GSH is creative because it believes that the salient meaning (no matter it is literal or metaphorical) is activated more quickly, though inappropriate in the context. Context cannot prevent the activation of the salient but inappropriate meaning.The examples analyzed in the thesis are carefully chosen. Firstly, they are divided into two groups, two in each group. The language of one group is Chinese, the other is English. This will ensure universal applicability of the research. Then the two advertisements in each group are different in that one has applied optimal innovation and the other not. This is not only easy to give comparative analysis, but also can show if the appliance of optimal innovation can cause pleasure of people. In the analyzing phase, the author firstly gave a careful analysis of the four advertisements language with GSH in order to make sure all the optimal innovations are found. The readers can also understand the hypothesis more clearly. Then the questionnaire is given to 40 subjects. They are asked to choose one advertisement that they think is good at least in each group, if they like, they can also choose both. The results show that the advertisements with optimal innovations are more popular than those not, no matter in Chinese group or English group. But the author also found that the Chinese advertisement without optimal innovation is very popular as the English one with optimal innovation. After careful analysis, two reasons are found:culture and form. It is proposed that GSH can be used more widely, such as salient context and nonsalient context. Limitations of the research, such as the sex factor in the analysis of the results and some suggestions for further research are also presented.