Intercultural Comparison Between Chinese And English Advertisements For Electronic Products

Along with technological development and economic globalization, electronic products have become essential tools in people’s work, life and entertainment and their advertising images spread into every corner around the world. Advertising language has evolved into an independent type of writing over 100 years. So, investigation in advertising language is the key to effective design and correct interpretation of advertisements.This study is a data analysis. Issues under investigation include characteristics of advertising language, applicability of Language Adaptation Theory to analysis of advertising language and aspects to be adapted in advertising language use. Based on the analysis of language materials, the investigation is a pragmatic interpretation of language materials. The samples are chosen from Chinese and English electronic product advertisements, which were launched on Internet, TV, radio, magazines, newspapers and outdoor posters.This thesis attempts to conduct the analysis with Verschueren’s Language Adaptation Theory as theoretical support. Language Adaptation Theory holds that language use is actually making choices, and three major inherent properties(variability, negotiability and adaptability) give assurance for making choices. The theory puts forward four angles of investigation(context, structure, dynamics and salience).This thesis is composed of five major parts. Chapter one is introduction, presenting research background, research questions and significance of the study. Chapter two provides a general literature review about advertising studies made by intercultural communication, marketing management and linguistic approach. Chapter three reviews Verschueren’s Language Adaptation Theory. Chapter Four covers data collection, analysis and discussion. Chapter five summarizes the major findings of the study.Through the comparison between Chinese and English electronic product advertisements, we come to a conclusion that Language Adaptation Theory is suitable for studying the advertising language, and the use of advertising language should dynamically adapt to extralinguistic elements(mental world, social world, physical world, linguistic channel and discourse property) and linguistic elements(language, code and style). The study also finds that, the reasons for the similarities between the Chinese and English advertisements are cultural convergence, economic globalization and the nature of communicative purpose, and the reason for the differences between the two is the coexistence of cultural convergence and cultural divergence.