A Contrastive Study Of The Memes In Chinese And English Advertisements

With the globalization of the world economy, advertisements seem to have penetrated into almost every aspect of people's life. The ultimate purpose of an advertisement is to create an attractive image in consumers'minds and then motivate or influence them to purchase the advertised goods. Thus, it is of vital importance for a sponsor of an advertisement to search for a good advertisement agency, which can compose an eyeball-catching advert for their products. Since China's entrance into the WTO, importing of foreign products and exporting of domestic products will become more and more universal. Therefore, it is necessary for advert designers to have their adverts internationalized and imported products indigenized. Because of these reasons, it is of great value to make a detailed contrastive analysis of the memes in both Chinese and English.Up to now, many scholars have devoted themselves to the study of adverts from the perspectives of rhetoric, discourse or pragmatics, but only a few of them have paid enough attention to the study of the memes in adverts. And even fewer have done any contrastive study of the memes in both Chinese and English adverts. Therefore, this thesis serves a tentative research on the contrastive study of Chinese and English adverts from the angle of memetics.Meme is a new theory proposed to explain the cultural evolution. The theory of memetics, as one of the most explanatory theories, appeals to scholars from different fields ever since it was put forward. It has already been applied in language study, translation, advertising, marketing and so on. Meanwhile, as is known to all, contrastive analysis is believed to be an effective method to explore and analyze two different languages. The integration of both memetics and contrastive linguistics may enhance the study of memes in Chinese and English. There have appeared many definitions about'meme', but these definitions vary greatly from each other. For an easy and clear analysis of the memes in this paper, we have suggested a specific definition for'meme'. We have collected thousands of Chinese and English adverts and classified them into memotype ad-memes and phenotype ad-memes.This paper, including the"Introduction"and the"Conclusion", consists of six parts, and the body is made up of four chapters. Besides the literature review and the introduction of the relevant theories, this paper focuses its attention on the contrastive study of the memes in Chinese and English adverts. It first makes a tentative exploration of the memes in Chinese and English adverts and then comes to a contrastive study of the mems. Finally, the reasons for the similarities and differences are also discussed.This thesis is intended to present some inspiration to advert designers so that they may compose more successful adverts for products. Besides, it aims to enrich the memetic theory because a contrastive study is of great help in understanding the characteristics of memes.