Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Research Background
Nowadays, advertisements can be found everywhere around us in our daily livesin various means. Just as Dyer(1996) said, “Every day and for most of our lives wesee and hear many advertisements. Even if you don’t read a newspaper or watchtelevision, and walk around the streets with eyes down, you will find it impossible toavoid some form of publicity, even if it’s only a trade display at a local store,uninvited handbills pushed through the letter box or card displayed in the window ofthe corner newsagent”. It is easily found that advertisement has penetrated into everyaspect of people’s public and private life, reflecting, molding and shaping our thoughtand action all the time.According to statistics, global advertising expense increased 5. 4% in 2012compared with that in 2011(CEIC, 2012). What’s more, China Advertising IndustryReport (2010-2011) shows that the advertising market size of China totaledRMB343.7 billion in 2010, up 22.5% from a year earlier. Thus, we can see thatadvertising plays an important role in national economy and connects with people’sconsumption very closely. It has been proven that frequent advertising not onlyincreases product sales but also helps customers to choose among all the availableproducts. As a matter of fact, designing a piece of effective advertisement is of greatsignificance. As an indispensable part of an advertisement, “language does play animportant role in the process of commercial persuasion. It is the primary vehicle forpresenting messages to consumers.” (Geis, 1982:23) Therefore, an analysis onadvertisement from linguistic perspective is worthwhile. The present thesis aims toanalyze pragmatic strategies used in English cosmetic advertisements based onContextual Adaptation Theory.
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1.2 Purpose and Significance of the Study
For many years, many scholars carried out advertising language studies fromperspectives of semiotics, pragmatics, semantics, ect. However, these previous studiesare restricted to the static level of analyzing that few of them explore the underlyingfactors that influence the language of advertising from a dynamic point of view. Also,previous study explores partly the related aspects to advertising language and almostnone has pointed out a consistent and comprehensive way to account for whyadvertising language is what it is and how it is produced. While, Verschueren’sContextual Adaptation Theory emphasizes that language using is a dynamic processto adapt to the social, mental and physical world, assigning “adaptation” as themotivation and driving force behind all pragmatic phenomena. Besides, as a particulartype of advertising, cosmetic advertising language hasn’t been commonly studied.Therefore, the aim of this thesis comes from the author’s concern of pragmatic studieson cosmetic advertising language. The author holds the view that cosmetic advertising is a form of communication between advertisers and the target audience incommunicative context, so studies on cosmetic advertising language should take thecontextual correlates, the mental world, the social world and the physical world intoconsideration which is the Adaptation Theory’s focus. There are various pragmaticstrategies available for advertisers. What are the standards and patterns when theychoose from these options? The present thesis aims to analyze pragmatic strategychoices in English cosmetic advertisements made to adapt to contextual correlatespostulated in Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1Previous Studies on Pragmatic Strategies Abroad
The research of pragmatic strategies has a history of more than fifty years.During the more than forty years, linguists, scholars, and pragmatic researchersstudied the subject with lots of datas and theories from different perspectives, lettingthe research of pragmatic strategies get into a deeper and more significant level. Inthe most general and broadest sense, pragmatics is the study of language in use (asagainst the study of language as an abstract system) or of “how language is used incommunication” (Leech 1983:1). In addition, language use is always strategic andconsists of the continuous making of choices of linguistic forms and strategies(Verschueren 2000: 55-56, Liu Senlin, 2002). Pragmatic strategy is one importantstudy field of pragmatics. Language users often depend on pragmatic strategies incommunication and communication is the aim to the application of pragmaticstrategies. Liu Senlin(2000) defined pragmatic strategies are “the appropriate waysin which a language user attains his/her communicative goals by using language,and, in the field of pragmatics specifically, by either implicature or indirect language.”It is the speaker’s adaptation to the communicative Cooperation Principle that isconsidered as a guideline for the implementation of the pragmatic strategies, andcovered in his analytical framework are some major pragmatic theories. So it can besaid that the study of pragmatic strategy is embedded in major pragmatic theories. Inother words, these pragmatic theories are more or less related to pragmatic strategy.As a result, the study of the strategic aspect of language use in communication for some intended communicative purpose or effect should be an important part inpragmatics.
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2.2 Previous Studies on Pragmatic Strategies at Home
Since the 1980s, more and more scholars displayed interests in pragmatics andpragmatic analysis of linguistic facts. Xu Guozhang (1979) is the first people tointroduce oversea pragmatic strategy theory. He translates Austin’s How to Do Thingswith Words, and then analyzes Speech Act Theory and applies these pragmaticstrategies to Chinese literatures. Hu Zhuanglin (1980) totally introduces the objectsand methods of pragmatic strategies, emphasizes the conversational implicature andalso studies the speaker’s meaning, the utterance meaning and contextual meaning.Professor Gu Yueguo(1990) of Beijing Foreign Studies University can be regarded asa pioneer work in the study of politeness in China. In his article PolitenessPhenomena in Modern Chinese, which relates to the study of politeness in modernChinese, professor Gu traces the origin of the notion of politeness in the Chineseculture. Based on modern Chinese data, Gu modifies some of Leech’s assumptionsand put forward his own set of politeness maxims which he thinks are more suitablefor the Chinese environment, which are the self-denigration maxim, the address termmaxim, the refinement maxim, the agreement maxim and the virtues-words-deedsmaxim.
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Chapter Three Theoretical Framework.......15
3.1 Introduction to Adaptation Theory.........15
3.2 Key Notions of Adaptation Theory........15
3.2.1 Making Choices....15
3.2.2 Three Properties of Language........16
3.2.3 Four Angles of Investigation.........18
3.3 Contextual Adaptation ………..........20
Chapter Four Data Analysis and Discussion........22
4.1 Adaptation to the Mental World.....22
4.2 Adaptation to the Social World......32
4.3 Adaptation the Physical World......42
Chapter Five Conclusion......46
5.1 Major Findings of the Study..........46
5.2 Limitations of the Study........47
5.3 Suggestions for Further Research...........48
Chapter Four Data Analysis and Discussion
4.1 Adaptation to the Mental World
There is a close relationship between advertisement and social psychology. Someexperts even declare that we have entered the age of “mental marketing”. Whenchoosing goods, people often have many psychological needs to be fulfilled. Becauseof this, advertisers always take the consumers’ mental world into consideration. Thus,when making linguistic choices in certain cases, the contextual factors acting in themental world plays a significant role. When language users take part in acommunication, they dynamically construct a mental world of the ongoingcommunication and its relevant social situation. It is in this way, and only in this waythat they are able to participate in such an event, understand what is going on, engagein an action, and execute their actions as part of a sequence and in interaction withother participants.Mental world includes the aspects of speakers and hearer’s personality, emotions,beliefs, desires, wishes, motivations, and intentions. The utterance needs to interadaptwith the interpreter’s mental world. Moreover, in most cases, the choices are made byutterers according to their assessment and assumption of what the mental world of theinterpreters look like. Therefore, judgments of the interpreter’s personality, emotions,patterns of beliefs, wishes and desires, motivations and intensions may be all involvedin. Through manipulating pragmatic strategies in cosmetic advertising, advertiserscater for the consumers’ emotion in order to promote their products.
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Conclusion
The present paper attempts to explore how advertisers make pragmatic strategychoices to adapt to the context correlates, which includes the mental world, the socialworld and the physical world activated by communicators in English cosmeticadvertisement. Chapter four gives a detailed analysis with case studies on adaptationof pragmatic strategies to context. In this chapter, the major findings and implicationsof this thesis, the limitations of the current research, and some suggestions for furtherresearch on the related topic are presented. Pragmatic strategy in advertising is carried out by the manipulation of linguisticdevices to achieve certain goals. Verscheuren views linguistic cases and phenomenonfrom the pragmatic aspect. He analyzes pragmatics as a functional perspective onlanguage which takes the complexity of its cognitive, cultural and social functioninginto consideration. In this thesis, the newly-developed linguistic ContextualAdaptation Theory has been chosen as the theoretical framework for this thesis.Though what is under study is only part of the advertising communication, it doesbring the study of advertising communication into the orbit of linguistic research.According to a detailed analysis on the basis of Contextual Adaptation Theory, it isfound that the production and interpretation of pragmatic strategies in advertising bothneed to take many factors into consideration.#p#分页标题#e#
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