A Study Of Online Dating Advertisements From The Perspective Of Adaptation

In recent years, with the development and popularization of network technology, more and more singles resort to the online dating sites to post personal advertisements. In order to find their ideal partners, the advertisers tend to manipulate the organization and contents of the texts to make their advertisements more attractive. Throughout the past two decades, scholars have done lots of research in this field from the perspective of sociology, psychology and linguistics. However, few touches the deep level of generation and explanation behind the dating advertisements. Based on the Belgium linguist Verschueren’s adaptation theory, this thesis makes an analysis on how advertisers achieve contextual adaptation to realize the goal of finding an ideal partner through the choices of context(including linguistic context and communicative context) in the advertising process.In this thesis, both qualitative and quantitative methodologies are employed to analyze the online dating advertisements. The research objects are constituted by100dating advertisements collected randomly from famous American dating sites:50published in Match.com, and an equivalent number taken from plentyoffish.com. In order to have a better understanding of these advertisements, the author firstly analyzes the language features of100online dating advertisements from three levels: lexical features, syntactic features and discourse features. And on that basis, the paper further probes into how the online dating advertisements adapt to ingredients of linguistic context and communicative context. The research findings indicate that adaptation of online dating advertisement to linguistic context mainly includes three perspectives: cohesion, intertextuality and sequencing. Cohesion is embodied by the frequent use of cohesive devices, such as conjunctions, anaphora, ellipsis, replacement and structural iconicity, which form some close links structurally and achieve relevance and coherence semantically. As to intertextuality, the textual features of online dating advertisements are influenced and restricted by the theme, linguistic style and stylistic features (such as quotations and allusions). The discourses affect and connect with each other, and thus develop an intertextual connection. The adaptation to sequencing refers to logical-semantic relations within the whole text, and most of the online dating advertisements follow the general arrangement sequence to some extent. Then, the adaptation of online dating advertisement is analyzed from the perspective of communicative context including mental world, social world and physical world. The adaptation to mental world can be divided into two parts: adaptation to advertisers’mental world and adaptation to audience’s mental world. The dating advertisements should not only make adaptation to the advertiser’s motivation to realize the expected purposes, namely the goal of finding an ideal partner, but also adapt to the audience’s pursuit of beauty and desire for love and happiness. Whether the online dating advertisement can be interpreted correctly by the audience is the prerequisite for advertisers to attain their desired objectives. Communicators live in social and cultural environment, so it is inevitable that their linguistic choice-making is constrained by social culture elements around them. So the online dating advertisements are the outcome of linguistic choices adaptable to the social world, including social conventions and culture, and the aspects of culture mainly include individualism and future orientation. At last, the advertisers should take full account of the physical world of the audience, and adapt to their time and space conception.The Adaptation Theory provides a new insight into the study of the language of online dating advertisement, which makes its language better to be appreciated. At the same time, we hope this thesis can provide reference for the advertisers. The advertiser’s choice-making should adapt to the audience reception psychology so as to create better advertising language. Moreover, the thesis may help the audience better understand and appreciate online dating advertisement so as to ensure the smooth communication between advertisers and audience.