A Relevance Theory Based Study On The Poetic Effects In Advertisement Language

Advertising language is a special language form, which is regarded as the art of persuading people with language. As the main carrier of advertisement information, advertising language is the core of a piece of advertisement as well as an important method of attracting consumers and promoting products.During the recent half century, linguists home and abroad have already explored the characteristics of advertisement language from different aspects, raised different definitions and analyzed its content and function under different theoretical frameworks. In the previous literature, most work has been done from the perspectives of sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, stylistics and pragmatics. The present study aims to explore the deeper connotation of advertisement language from a cognitive pragmatic point of view, and hopefully it could shed new light on the understanding and evaluation of advertisement language.In order to explore the significance of advertising language in the perspective of cognitive pragmatics and thus provide some cognitive basis for the composition and appreciation of advertisements, the present study attempts to apply Relevance Theory raised by Sperber D. and Wilson D. in their book Relevance: Communication and Cognition(1986/1995), studying the poetic effect in advertising language, providing a cognitive interpretation of advertisement discourse. According to the Relevance Theory, during the process of communication and interpretation, the audience sometimes tends to pay more cognitive efforts than just interpreting the surface meaning of language. These extra efforts permit the audience to obtain some contextual effects that are embodied in an array of weak implicatures, namely, the focus of this study, poetic effects. It is just these poetic effects that make the language achieve optimal relevance and thus lead to correct interpretation and even deep impression.The present research on the poetic effects in advertising discourse mainly enters from the peculiar styles such as epizeuxis, zeugma, parody and pun etc. The composers of the advertisements often effectively utilize this process during which poetic effects are produced, so as to make the advertising discourse more attractive and more impressive, and thus achieve the anticipated effects of adverts such as propaganda and promotion of goods, organization or service. Firstly, this study assumes that relevance! is the inner cause of the realization of discourse interpretation; secondly, on this theoretical foundation, it studies the characteristics of the concrete discourse, i.e. advertisement language, analyzes the relevance in its inner meaning, and explores the interpretation of poetic effects in advertisement language under Relevance Theory; lastly, it comes to a conclusion, i.e. the realization of the anticipated effects of advertisement language relies much on the application and chaining of a series of contextual assumptions, i.e. a process in which optimal relevance has been achieved through a wide array of weak implicatures in the form of poetic effects.