（外国语言学及应用语言学专业论文）广告语体的关联顺应论研究.pdf

a relevance-adaptation theoretic approach to the genre of advertisement iv 摘 要 sperber 顺应; 关联顺应模式; 广告语体 a relevance-adaptation theoretic approach to the genre of advertisement ii abstract according to sperber and wilsons relevance theory, communication is an ostensive-inferential process and the communicators presumption of relevance decides his/her choices of linguistic styles. according to verschuerens adaptation theory, communication is an adaptation process and pragmatics is a general cognitive, social and cultural perspective on linguistic phenomena in relation to their usage in forms of behavior; using language consists in the continuous making of linguistic choices in terms of variability, negotiability and adaptability. combining the respective advantages of the two theories, this thesis proposes a relevance-adaptation theoretic model, which claims the following five points: first, the goal of communication is for the sake of optimal relevance. in the process of communication, the speakers task is to convey what is relevant to the hearer, and for the hearer, s/he has to find the proper interpretation that is of optimal relevance. second, adaptation is a dynamic process of achieving optimal relevance. third, speakers presumption of relevance decides his choice of language, which is manifested on different levels of linguistic structures: phonetic and phonological, morphological, syntactic and discoursal. fourth, in the process of dynamic choice, choices of language and context (physical world, social world and mental world) are interadaptable. only when choice of language is adapted to the context of different kinds, can the effect of optimal relevance be achieved in communication, and vice versa. last, relevance-adaptation is also a process of choosing pragmatic strategies. based on the relevance-adaptation model, this thesis makes a pragmatic exploration to the genre of advertisements. it is found out that before the production of an advertisement, the advertiser must first form his presumption of relevance, which is then made manifest to the potential consumers through ostensive stimulus of many kinds. as such, the informative and communicative intentions of the advertiser can be realized. advertisements can be taken as the result of structural adaptation at phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic and discoursal levels, as well as a 中南民族大学硕士学位论文 iii result of pragmatic adaptation in that popular informal forms, polite expressions, indirect language, fuzzy diction and impressive rhetorical devices are frequently employed to serve the special needs of ads. besides, the production of advertisements can be taken as a process of adaptation to the contexts, including situational context, social context, and psycho-cognitive context. application of relevance-adaptation theoretic model to the analysis of advertising genre may be of help, more or less, in the advertisers production of advertisements as well as the consumers interpretation of them. key words: relevance; adaptation; r elevance-adaptation theoretic model; genre of advertisement 中南民族大学 学位论文原创性声明 本人郑重声明所呈交的论文是本人在导师的指导下独立进行研究所 取得的研究成果除了文中特别加以标注引用的内容外本论文不包含任 何其他个人或集体已经发表或撰写的成果作品对本文的研究做出重要贡 献的个人和集体均已在文中以明确方式标明本人完全意识到本声明的 法律后果由本人承担 作者签名 日期 年 月 日 学位论文版权使用授权书 本学位论文作者完全了解学校有关保留使用学位论文的规定同意 学校保留并向国家有关部门或机构送交论文的复印件和电子版允许论文 被查阅和借阅本人授权中南民族大学可以将本学位论文的全部或部分内 容编入有关数据库进行检索可以采用影印缩印或扫描等复制手段保存 和汇编本学位论文 本学位论文属于 1保密在_年解密后适用本授权书 2不保密 请在以上相应方框内打 作者签名 日期 年 月 日 导师签名 日期 年 月 日 中南民族大学硕士学位论文 i acknowledgements first and foremost, im especially grateful to professor xu ju, my faculty advisor, for the enlightening instruction she has given me in planning and preparing this thesis, for her enthusiastic and unfailing encouragement when i came across various difficulties in my study and thesis writing, and for the pains she has taken to read and revise the previous versions time and again. without her help, this thesis would have been impossible. thanks also go to all other professors of the college of foreign languages, south central university for nationalities, whose inspiring lectures have greatly benefited my intellectual growth. my final thanks go to all of my classmates, with whom i have shared my gains and pains during my postgraduate study. 中南民族大学硕士学位论文 1 chapter 1 introduction advertisements, as the prominent symbols of modern civilization, have exerted drastic influence on our life. whenever you open a newspaper or a magazine, turn on the television or the radio, surf on the internet, you are sure to be confronted with a swarm of advertisements. as is vividly expressed by a famous advertiser, “in the united states you will find yourself being urged from every page of every piece of newspaper and in practically every tv channel to buy all kinds of goods that you are actually quite happy without” (zhou qiuqin, 2000: 54). advertisements can be divided into different types according to different criteria of categorization, say, commercial advertisements and non-commercial advertisements according to the communicative purpose, consumer advertisements and business advertisements according to the target audience, printed advertisements and non-printed advertisements according to the medium, local, national and international advertisements according to the area of coverage. since the main function of advertisements is to get economic benefits, this thesis will be focused on the commercial advertisements mainly, most of which are collected from qi yunfangs advertisements and english advertising. advertisements are defined differently by different people from different angles. qi yunfang defines advertising as “what tells about or praises a product or a service publicly through newspaper, handbills, radio and so on so as to make people want to buy it, and make something known or give notice of something” (2003: 2). american marketing association defines advertising as “the non-personal communication of information, usually paid for and persuasive in nature about products, services of ideas by identified sponsors through various media” (zhao jing, 1992: 1). american association of advertising agencies defines advertising as “a paid way of making something public, which aims to communicate information, to attract and hold peoples attention to products, to persuade people to buy things advertised and finally bring profits to identified sponsors” (sun xiaoli, 1995: 3). in brief, advertising is a a relevance-adaptation theoretic approach to the genre of advertisement 2 kind of specific communicative act, which aims to induce and persuade potential consumers to buy the products advertised. seen from the definitions mentioned above, the main functions of advertisements can be summarized as follows: first, to convey information to consumers; second, to make the products look as aesthetically pleasing as possible so as to appeal to various desires such as the desires for beauty, comfort, health, love, wealth, security, romance, fashion, power next, to influence and persuade people to buy the products advertised. to achieve the ultimate goal of talking potential consumers into taking purchasing action, advertisers would spare no effort in order to design an attractive advertisement with unique linguistic, stylistic and pragmatic features. that is to say, in order to perform the informative, aesthetic and persuasive functions, advertisements must be special in their choice of words, use of language structures, and pragmatic strategies. since linguistic, stylistic and pragmatic adaptation to advertising genre is to realize pragmatic intentions of information service and persuasion, it is significant to study the pragmatic processes of advertisement production and interpretation. sperber and wilson (1986: 67) define pragmatic process as one that is “used to bridge the gap between the semantic representations of the sentences and the interpretation of utterances in context”. since advertising is a pragmatic process in which advertisers and consumers are both involved, it requires consumers to infer the implied meaning of the advertisement, i.e. to bridge the gap between its lexical meaning and contextual meaning. so pragmatic research pays equal attention to the linguistic structure and the physical, social and cognitive contexts in which it is used. according to the relevance theory, communication is an asymmetrical ostensive-inferential process: on the one hand, the speaker (advertiser) must first assume properly the receivers cognitive resources and then choose appropriate structures and strategies to make his intentions manifest to the audience to guarantee the success of communication; on the other, the receiver (consumer) acquires optimal relevance through the linguistic and non-linguistic ostension made by the speaker (advertiser) in the process of the unique communication. adaptability, according to 中南民族大学硕士学位论文 3 verschuerens adaptation theory, is the property of language, which enables people to make negotiable linguistic choices from a variable range of possibilities in such a way as to approach points of satisfaction for communicative needs (verschueren, 1999: 61). to achieve this purpose, advertisers will rack their minds for the best ways to adapt their advertisements to the various social-psychological dimensions. for such a consideration, this paper takes advertising genre as its research object and attempts to explore how advertisements are adapted to the social the coded iconic message, with a picture reflecting the connotation of the image of the product; the non-coded iconic message, with a photograph of the real image of the product. as for the interpretation of either the linguistic or the iconic message, he maintains that there exist two levels of meaning in a sign: denotation and connotation. the former is related to the literal meaning of a sign, to what is “objectively” presented and easily recognized or identified while the latter refers to meanings which lie beyond denotation but are not independent from it. barthes believes that different messages in advertisements are disentangled solely by reading systems of signs. this theory postulates that a potentially infinite number of different messages are carried by a finite number of signs, however, it does not point out the deep reasons behind this phenomenon. as claimed by tanaka, “barthes account fails to explain the 中南民族大学硕士学位论文 5 popularity in advertising of such linguistic devices as the pun, where the linguistic message is intentionally polysemous” (1994: 3). besides, tanaka also points out that barthes analysis fails to provide a convincing explanation for the advertisements. williamson (1983) proposes the phrase “decoding advertisements” for the first time and she analyzes the magazine advertisements, discusses the signs and symbols in use and explains how they work. her central interest lies in what advertisements mean and how this meaning relates to individual identity. she argues that the message in the advertisements is to be understood on two levels: the “manifest” level and the “latent” level, and the audience are required to establish appropriate association to obtain the right meaning. and also, there is a gap between the intended meaning encoded linguistically by the advertisers and the possible interpretations on the part of audience. according to williamson, the gap is filled by the audiences knowledge, however, she does not demonstrate how the pre-existent knowledge helps to determine the way advertisements are understood. humans do not just communicate by encoding and decoding messages. an utterance does not always mean what it literally says or what is encoded in the language structure. in order to further interpret the untold or implied part of meaning, we should resort to the context, physical or cognitive. 2.2 a stylistic approach leechs (1966) english in advertising: a linguistic study of advertising in great britain can be regarded as the earliest research work on advertisements, which gives a comprehensive description of the linguistic features employed in advertising language. a scientific attitude is revealed in his quantitative methodology in describing what advertising language is like. in this work, leech has employed modern linguistic theories to probe into the features of advertising language after a detailed analysis of the purposes and functions of advertisements. his work is indeed an embryonic analysis of language in context and stimulates many other linguists to further study this subject, especially those in china. among them, wang zuoliang and ding wangdao (1987) analyze the language in newspaper advertisements from the a relevance-adaptation theoretic approach to the genre of advertisement 6 stylistic point of view. they investigate advertising language from aspects of lexical on the other hand, their cognitive abilities are different, too. therefore, although people share the identical material world, their understanding of the objective world varies, more or less, from one to another. but rts real intention by pointing out the cognitive subjects variation in their understanding of the objective world is to indicate the existence of their abilities of perceiving the facts in such an environment. when two individuals cognitive 中南民族大学硕士学位论文 9 environments manifest identical facts or assumptions, there will be an overlap between their cognitive environments, or, we may also say that they are partly sharing their cognitive environments. for instance, tom, an eight-year-old child, and his grandpa, who, over eighty, has ever experienced the war, are talking about the second world war. to tom, the war was brutal because so many people were killed in it; while to his grandpa, the war may mean far more than what tom thinks it to be. so the war is discrepantly manifest to them. this is a case of absence of mutual manifestness. mutual manifestness can produce an effect on communication, in which the communicator needs to infer the proper contextual facts from the cognitive environment of the hearer, such as the expectations, faith, memory, etc. in other words, the speaker needs to make what he intends to say perceivable and inferable by the hearer. to arrive at this purpose, the speaker must take into account the physical environments and cognitive abilities of the hearer in the process of communication. only by doing so, the success of communication can be guaranteed to some degree. 3.1.2 dynamics of the context it is usually believed that the context for the comprehension process is determined and given in advance, but sperber and wilson propose (1995) that the context is not given but chosen. at any moment, the hearer has at his disposal a particular set of accessible contexts, from which an actual context is chosen. sperber that is, the context is endowed with the property of dynamics. the initial context is selected according to the most relevant assumption so that the hearer can get the satisfactory contextual effects by means of the smallest processing efforts; alternatively, the initial selection of the context is dominated by the principle of relevance. and then, the initial context chosen is extended in three directions: by adding to it information from previous verbal exchange (linguistic context); by adding to it information from ones encyclopedic memory (cognitive context); by adding to it information from the interpreters own physical environment (physical context). no matter from what kind of direction the context is originated, the interaction between the newly-presented information and the existed contextual assumptions (old information) is under way, along with which process new context is constructed. sperber in the meantime, the hearer has to decode the sound message (informative intention) that has been made manifest by the speaker. stimulated and guided by the speakers ostensive behavior, the hearer makes an inference of the speakers communicative intention in a certain direction, with the decoded evidence as one part of the premise, combined with the hearers own cognitive context (old information). as such, the real purpose of the speakers ostensive behavior is realized: to make manifest to the audience his communicative intention. a relevance-adaptation theoretic approach to the genre of advertisement 12 3.1.4 the principle of relevance an ostensive act carries a guarantee of relevance, which is considered as the principle of ostensive communication. sperber instead, it is a matter of degree and a comparative one that is characterized in terms of effect and effort, specifically, the cognitive effects the optimal processing achieves and the effort needed to process it optimally. concretely speaking, the degree of relevance is in inverse proportion to processing effort: the more the effort that is needed for processing an assumption or information, the smaller the degree of its relevance will be. however, it is in direct proportion to the cognitive or contextual effect: the larger is the contextual effect, the greater the degree of relevance will be. according to relevance theory, humans automatically aim at maximal relevance, i.e. maximal cognitive effect for minimal processing effort, which is regarded as the most general factor that determines a variety of aspects in the course of communication, say, to which information attention is paid, which background assumptions are retrieved from memory and used as context, as well as which inferences are drawn. to communicate is to claim someones attention, and hence, to demand some