| Since the beginning of the 1990's the real estate industry in China has developed from puniness to prosperity. The competition in this field is becoming fiercer and fiercer, especially in the last decade. Thus real estate advertisements come into being and become more and more important as a very useful tool for promoting sales. In 2010, the total input of real estate advertisements is 16 billion Yuan RMB and it has become the largest portion in the total input of advertisements (Data from the National Bureau of Statistics). Geis points out that"the advertisement is used to persuade or otherwise entice people to purchase products or services"(1994: 42). A good real estate advertisement not only makes an accurate definition for a real estate project but also impresses the prospective customers deeply and most importantly it will further encourage people to take purchasing action. In order to reach the goal, the language in real estate advertisements has been carefully designed with special features in order to adapt to potential customers, but the academic research on it does not keep the same pace. Therefore, this paper aims at finding out those features.Jef Verschueren puts forward the Adaptation Theory, and holds that the process of using language is a process of continuously making linguistic choices, consciously or unconsciously in order to realize adaptations. The production of real estate advertisements is the use of language in a special field, and a series of linguistic choices should be made in the process of real estate advertisement production. In this thesis, with the Adaptation Theory as the theoretical foundation, 324 pieces of Chinese real estate advertisements mainly from the very authoritative media including New Culture News, East Asia Economy and Trade News, Changchun Real Estate Development News are carefully studied by the qualitative method and the quantitative approach. And the author finally found out prominent features of linguistic choices in Chinese real estate advertisements.Firstly, on levels of linguistic structures, real estate advertisers make the following choices in Chinese real estate advertisements in order to adapt to potential customers. On phonological level, the symmetrical structure of the Chinese syllables has been chosen; on lexical level, words or morphemes expressing greatest or maximal in degree as well as some very novel coined words have been chosen; on syntactic level, declarative sentences have been chosen as the major sentence style to convince the prospective customers. Besides, most sentences of medium length consisting of 8 to 16 Chinese characters have been chosen. And at last, a large amount of figures of speech have been chosen in Chinese real estate advertisements.Secondly, the author found that the real estate advertisers mainly choose eight factors related to real estate projects in order to adapt to potential customers and stimulate their desire to purchase real estate products, which is, from the perspective of the Adaptation Theory, exactly the process of realizing contextual correlates of adaptability. On the basis of adaptation to the physical world, real estate advertisers mainly realize the adaptation to the mental world, social world of potential customers.The real estate advertisers choose to promote the following four factors to realize the adaptation to the mental world. Firstly, advantageous geographical locations and traffic conditions of real estate products have been chosen to promote to adapt to customers'motivation for convenience. Secondly, the competitive price factor has been chosen to promote by advertisers so as to adapt to customers'motivation for cheapness. Thirdly, qualification and credibility of the real estate developers, quality of the project and qualification of the property management have been chosen to promote to adapt to customers'motivation for credibility. Finally, lake and mountain scenery around real estate projects has been chosen to promote to adapt to consumers'desire for tranquil idyllic living style. Beside the promotion of the above four factors to adapt to consumers'mental world, real estate advertisers promote another four factors to adapt to customers'social world, the first of which is the foreignized feature of real estate projects that has been strongly promoted to adapt to the foreignized custom in Chinese society; the second of which is the warm family concept created by real estate projects that has been promoted to adapt to social culture of family orientation in China; the third of which is the supporting education institutions of real estate project that have been chosen to promote to adapt to the social culture of attaching great importance to education in China; and the last of which is the luxury of real estate project that has been strongly promoted to adapt to the luxurious social custom in modern China.Those findings of linguistic features in Chinese real estate advertisements may both deepen our understanding of real estate advertisements and give useful enlightenment to the creation of much better Chinese real estate advertisements in the future. |
