An Analysis Of Puns In English Commercial Advertisements From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

With the development of society and economy,advertisements which are viewed as an indispensable part of daily life have been everywhere in society.They play an important role in promotion and boosting the economy and they are also popular among people because of their unique charm.In the process of making advertisements,advertisers prefer to use figures of speech to strengthen persuasiveness and attract consumers' interests among which pun is frequently used in English commercial advertisements.Puns are analyzed from the perspective of Adaptation Theory that is put forward by the Belgium pragmatist Verschueren.It puts weight on the factors such as cognition,society,and culture in the process of using language and integrates plenty factors that originally belong to different subjects.And it also put forward analyzing frame in describing and explaining pragmatic phenomena.On this point,how puns in English commercial advertisements make adaptation to structure and context is analyzed in this thesis.The topic is chosen due to the following reasons.First,it is regarded as a new perspective to study puns based on Adaptation Theory in linguistics which deserves more attention.Then,the existing researches mainly focus on the definition,classification and translation strategy of puns while this thesis tries to explore the pragmatic functions of puns and broadens the study level.The following questions are analyzed in this thesis: first,what kinds of puns are utilized in English commercial advertisements? Second,in what way do puns in English commercial advertisements adapt to linguistic structure and specific context? Third,in what way puns are used by advertisers to achieve their purposes? For analyzing puns in English commercial advertisements,sufficient materials from many books are collected and representative ones are chosen and empirical research is adopted to analyze puns.This thesis mainly talks about the ways in which puns in English commercial advertisements adapt to structure and context in order to achieve the purpose of promotion.Then,through the analysis,advice of using puns effectively in making English commercial advertisements and the ways for consumers to have a betterunderstanding of puns in English commercial advertisements are put forward.This thesis consists of three parts including introduction,main body,and conclusion.The main content is as follows.The first part is the introduction.This part introduces the background and the frame of the study and briefly describes puns in English commercial advertisements.And this thesis also introduces the objective,methodology,and significance of the study and so on.The second part is the main body including three chapters.The first chapter is the literature review.This chapter firstly introduces the overview on puns including the definitions,characteristics and classification.Then,it introduces the Adaptation theory including making linguistic choices,three core properties and four analysis perspectives.Finally,it introduces the characteristics of commercial advertisements and shows the properties and reasons for selecting the subject.The second chapter introduces the structural adaptation of puns in English commercial advertisements.This chapter consists of three levels,namely phone,lexicon,and syntax.This chapter makes empirical analysis on puns in English commercial advertisements through using plenty materials and shows how puns in English commercial advertisements adapt to the three different levels.The third chapter analyzes the contextual adaptation of puns in English commercial advertisements.This chapter analyzes puns in English commercial advertisements from mental world,social world,and physical world.In mental world,puns in English commercial advertisements are analyzed from the five levels of needs which are put forward by Maslow.In social world,the adaptation of linguistic choices reflects in social cultures and social communicative regulation.In physical world,puns in English commercial advertisements are analyzed from temporal reference and spatial reference.The third part is a conclusion.This part makes the conclusion of the whole thesis and shows the findings of structural adaptation and contextual adaptation.As the study shows,Adaptation theory provides a new perspective for analyzing puns in English commercial advertisements and plays a positive role in making English advertisements.Finally,the limitations of this thesis and advice for future study are shown.