| Advertisement is a kind of publicity means with certain intentions and strategies. The essence of advertising is to persuade people to buy products. With the development of media technology, there are increasing amounts of audible advertisements. However, the phonetic studies on the advertisement speeches are few. Hence, this thesis adopts the phonetic perspective to analyze the advertisement speech with the phonetic process software Pratt.Prosodic features can convey certain intentions and emotional properties. Accent is an important part of the prosodic features. Zhang Lixia(2014) finds that accent serves for intention in Chinese discourse and there is a positive relationship between accent and subjectivity. This thesis extends the study to the English advertisement to verify the relationship between accent and intention as well as the relationship between accent and subjectivity in it. This thesis collects two types of advertisements, namely the public service advertisement and the profit advertisement. The profit advertisement falls into two subtypes, namely the commercial advertisement and the TV shopping advertisement.The result shows: first, the accented words in all these advertisements function as highlighting the general intentions from different angles and levels. Second, there is a positive relationship between the intensity of accent and degree of subjectivity in the English advertisements. The words including nouns, pronouns, verbs and prepositions are accented to show the concrete content of intention. However, the words with stronger subjectivity trend to be higher in accent intensity, such as auxiliary verbs, adjectives, adverbs, numerals and conjunctions. What’s more, the distribution among the different types of advertisements are unbalanced. The TV shopping advertisements have stronger subjectivity than other two types. In summary, in the English advertisement, accent serves for highlighting the speaker’s intention, and accent is positively correlated with subjectivity. |
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