（外国语言学及应用语言学专业论文）广告英语的语义研究.pdf

中南民族大学硕士学位论文 v 摘 要 广告，即“广而告之”，是信息时代必不可少的宣传工具，也是现代生活中人们接受外界信息， 感受商业生活的重要渠道。 不管我们走在路上还是呆在家里，广告都会以各种各样的形式出现在我们的视野里，影响着我们的观念，甚至改变我们的消费决策。广告就其内容而言，可大致分为两类：“商业广告”和“公益广告”。二者虽形式各异但目的却殊途同归，正如美国国家广告协会总结的：认知、理解、劝说、行动。 进入新世纪，外文广告，特别是英文广告的大量涌入给广告语言增添了新的内容，它以原产国的语言为载体，带着浓烈的异域风格，面对的又是不同国家的语言群体。英文广告语言的魅力是可以向其他国家的人们传达其独特的信息、内涵甚至情感。 许多优秀的广告设计者总是能较好的使用精炼的语言符号表达丰富的产品内涵。成功的广告言简意赅，情感丰富，形象生动，给人留下深刻的艺术效果。而失败的广告在语言上有的辞不达意，有的过分夸张，有的牵强附会，不但让读者产生反感，也与作者的初衷背道而驰。因此，对广告语言进行语义研究是语言学研究中值得深入探讨的话题。 语义学是研究“语言的意义”的科学。上世纪 70 年代，英国著名语言学家geoffrey leech 在其著作 语义学 中将语言的意义分为七类。 在不同的语体中，这七种意义各有体现，发挥着不同的语义作用。本文希望以此理论为基础，研究分析英文广告的写作技巧， 并探讨得体的广告语言在完善产品形象和提高产品价值中的重要意义。 本文旨在对英语广告进行语义上的研究分析，共分五个部分: 第一部分回顾了以往国内外学者对英语广告的研究成果并提出本文的主题广告英语的语义研究。 第二部分是对语义理论的介绍。具体介绍了语义理论的定义，内容及其在生活中的运用。 第三部分是对广告的说明。 内容包括广告的概念， 广告的功能和广告的分类。an analysis of english ads in the semantic approach vi第四部分是文章的主体。该部分重点分析了广告英语的语言特点，概念意义 与广告命名中的作用，联想意义与广告词编写的作用，主题意义与广告语篇安排上的作用。 第五部分是文章的结论部分。作者对全文进行总结，指出了研究过程中存在的不足以及由此产生的新的研究启示。 对广告英语进行语义研究，不仅能增强人们对语义学这一理论的认识，也具有重要的社会文化价值。 既可以从语义学角度向人们展示一种新的研究广告语言的方法，又可以反应不同文化价值观对人们生活带来的影响。总之，通过研究分析可以在充分欣赏广告英语魅力的同时，丰富读者运用语言的知识和技能。 关键词：广告英语 概念意义 联想意义 主题意义中南民族大学硕士学位论文 iiiabstract advertising, which is from a latin word “advertere”, means “to catch peoples attention”. in our information era, it is not only a necessary instrument of propaganda, but also an important channel for people to receive outdoor information and experience commercial life. no matter whether we walk on street or stay at home, advertising would appear in our eyes, affect our ideas and even change our shopping decisions through various kinds of advertising forms. we can classify the advertising into two categories: “commercial advertising” and “public service advertising” according to different contents. although the two categories have different forms, their aims are the same. just as ama (american marketing association) concludes: give customers information, make customers understand and persuade customers to take action finally. in the new century, the entering of foreign language advertising, especially english advertising, adds new contents to the advertising languages. those kinds of advertising express ideas in original languages, carry strong foreign styles and face different language receivers in different countries. the fascination of english advertising is to transmit its special information, connotation and even emotion to foreigners. talented advertisers can express abundant information of products through emotional language. successful advertising can impress customers deeply with its well-designed language content, abundant emotions and active images. on the contrary, unsuccessful advertising will give customers negative feelings, with inexact words, extreme exaggeration or farfetched contexts, which are beyond advertisers aims. so it is worthwhile to analyze the advertising words semantically. semantics is a kind of science that studies “the meanings of language”. in 1970s, the british linguist geoffrey leech divided the meanings of language into seven parts in his famous work semantics. these seven meanings appear and function respectively in different language contexts. based on this theory, this paper tries to study the skills of advertising writing and to explore the special value of appropriate an analysis of english ads in the semantic approach ivadvertising words in the process of company image building and extra profit adding. this paper is devoted to the semantic analysis of advertising english and divided into five parts: chapter one is an introduction to the paper. it reviews the previous domestic and foreign researchers outcome in advertising language research and points out the theme of the papersemantic analysis of english advertising. chapter two gives a general introduction to semantic theory, which contains the definition, the content and the application of the theory in life. chapter three is a brief introduction to advertising. it involves the definition, the functions and the classification of advertising. chapter four is the main part of this paper, which gives a focus on the language characters of advertising, the relationships between the conceptual meaning and brand name choice, the associative meaning and advertising words writing, the thematic meaning and advertising context arrangement. chapter five is the conclusion of the paper. the author summarizes the whole paper, points out some limitations and puts forward some new enlightenment on the further research. the semantic analysis of advertising can not only strengthen readers theoretical understanding in semantics, but also have some important value in social and cultural research. it can not only give readers a new semantic approach in advertising language research, but also reflect the effects of different cultural values on peoples life. above all, it can enrich readers with some new skills in language application in the process of advertising appreciation. key words: advertising english, conceptual meaning, associative meaning, thematic meaning 中南民族大学硕士学位论文 i 中南民族大学中南民族大学 学位论文原创性声明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：李勋 日期： 08 年 6 月 13 日 学位论文版权使用授权书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：李勋 日期：08 年 6 月 13 日 导师签名： 日期： 年 月 日 an analysis of english ads in the semantic approach iiacknowledgements firstly, i would like to express the most sincere gratitude to my tutorprofessor luo jiansheng for her selfless guidance and help. being very busy with her work, she always manages to squeeze some time to help me with my study and to give me valuable advice in time. she is always ready to help when i need support in further research. it is with her guidance that i am making progress. in my writing of this dissertation, she gave me precious suggestions and recommendations. i am also grateful to other professors and teachers, whose lectures have given me a lot of nutrition and broadened my horizon greatly. next, i would like to thank my colleagues and classmates. i will never forget those suggestive questions and sparkling discussions, which have given me much enlightenment and encouragement. thirdly, my great appreciation and best wishes will go to my parents and other family members. because in the process of my research, they have always been supporting my study and sacrificed a lot to me. to them, maybe “thanks” is not enough at all. without them, i would mean nothing. i love them forever. last but not the least, i would like to thank the oral defense panel, professor huang chongzhen, professor yuan xuefen, professor zhang liyu, professor lv wanying and professor xu ju. their inspiring questions and advice will help me to get the paper better. 中南民族大学硕士学位论文 1 chapter 1 introduction in a society of market-oriented economy, people will find themselves being urged from every page of newspaper or every promotion of television advertising to buy all kinds of goods that are actually not quite necessary for them. dyer.g. described the pervasiveness of advertising in this way, “every day and for most of our lives we see and hear many advertisements. even if you dont read a newspaper or watch television, and walk around the streets with eyes down, you will find it impossible to avoid some form of publicity, even if its only a trade display at a local store, uninvited handbills pushed through the letter box or card displayed in the window of the corner newsagent” (1982:3). from that description, we can see advertising industry has been pervading since the early 1980s. advertising is not only an effective method of promotion, but an elegant action of design. successful english advertising generally contains obvious linguistic characteristics, the attainment of which not only depends on the appropriate command and creative application of english words and sentences, but also is closely related to the comprehensive use of semantic theory. on the basis of tremendous advertising examples, the paper aims at analyzing the linguistic characteristics of english ads from the perspectives of semantics. 1.1 literature review in the latter part of the last century, a lot of advertising researches began to appear in different academic fields, such as psychology, economics, aesthetics, linguistics, etc. among which linguistics was really the main part. many linguists have devoted their life to the study of the linguistic characteristics of the advertising english. their successful work has made a great contribution to advertising industry. advertising is a communication vehicle between advertisers and consumers. a successful advertising often combines a system of elements, such as words, pictures, sound and especially videos in current times. among them, the advertising language an analysis of english ads in the semantic approach 2plays a vital role. so it is necessary to summarize the research work, which has already been done on the study of advertising language with the enlightenment of linguistic theories. in 1966, geoffrey leech finished his book english in advertising, which is the earliest classic linguistic analysis of advertising language. in that book, geoffrey leech gave detail descriptions of advertising vocabulary and structures. his main contribution lies in his finding out the functions of the most frequently used adjectives in english advertisements, such as new, good, free, fresh, delicious, etc. he told readers what advertising language was like with a large number of examples, but left no reasonable conclusion. this is a fairly good example for descriptive research on advertising, from which a scientific attitude can be seen although he failed to interpret advertising language. in 1982, another linguist geis completed his linguistic work the language of television advertising, which describes the “deceptive methods” in various kinds of television advertising and emphasizes that the study of advertising language closely links up with communication and pragmatics, for it will be meaningless if we consider the language of advertising as it stands without touching upon its goal and function. by analyzing american television advertising， geis argued that advertisers should be responsible for any non-idiosyncratic inferences, which were drawn by their audience. more specifically，he maintained that advertisers should be accountable for what their advertising implied，as well as what their advertising asserted，for ordinary people could not be expected to “distinguish between valid and invalid inferences”(1982). but geis paid more attention to the negative aspects than to the positive ones of language implication and only provided possible interpretations of claims in advertising and the ways that advertisers could deceive the consumers “without touching the role of the messages in advertising and the motivations and drives behind them”. he did not show how the context was determined，nor did he demonstrate “how background knowledge shared by speaker and hearer” was established. vestergaard and schroder analyzed the advertising language from sociolinguistic perspectives in their pioneering work the language of advertising 中南民族大学硕士学位论文 3(1985). they gave us a new definition about linguistic strategies: “there is a relation between advertising language structure and advertising functions, namely, the informational function and the persuasive function. the advertiser can achieve their communicative aims with the design of advertising language structures.” meanwhile, they continued their work to explore the connection between the social impetuses that lay behind particular types of advertising and social repercussions of advertising. unfortunately, they failed to put this work forwards beyond their former achievement. they just did a data collection and provided many examples, which lacked an analytical framework in the main chapter of this book entitled sex and class. meanwhile, the two scholars also talked about the functional analysis of advertising, but could not analyze the functions in detail and ignored the reflective function of advertising language. another linguist guy cook analyzed advertising context in his book the discourse of advertising (1992). on the contrary, guy cook seemed to be more willing to relate advertising to literature. he cited many examples from literary and sub-literary texts and used theories of poetics to analyze them. he concluded, “ although the main focus of discourse analysis is on language, it is not concerned with language alone. it also exams the context of communicationwhen music and pictures combine with language to alter or add to its meaning, then discourse analysis must consider these modes of communication too”. but still readers can not fully understand what cooks original aim was or on which part cook emphasized about advertising. in our country, the past few years have also witnessed the publication of dozens of papers concerning advertising language analysis. li zhongxing in advertising english (1988) pointed out that the language in advertising english feature being brief, popular, creative and true. he mentioned the stylistic characteristics of advertising english respectively represented in lexical choices, syntactic features and rhetorical devices. another linguistic scholar zhang lin set up a good example in his book a brief analysis of english advertising language (1998). he pointed out that abundant repetitions of adjectives in advertising language could an analysis of english ads in the semantic approach 4have “pressing” and “persuasive” functions. as to advertising functions, ma jianqing presented his aida (attention, interest, desire, action) theory in his book the psychology in modern advertising (1997), in which he claimed that aida was the most popular and classic theory in foreign countries. other scholars paid more attention to the language characters of advertising and appreciated the advertising language from an artistic view. but it is not difficult to see that few of them have analyzed the english advertising within the framework of semantics. as a result, in this thesis, the author tries to provide a semantic analysis of advertising english. 1.2 main aim and structure of the thesis as we all know, “advertising is a non-personal communication of information”. it provides information from an artistic view as deliberate and consciously articulated messages. it completes the purpose of persuading and converting potential consumers through a rather complex process with the help of various media, in which the advertising language (or advertising words, to be more exact) is the most important vehicle. “advertising language is a communicative vehicle of advertising.” it can arouse the interests and emotions in favor of goods and services and, what is more, reflect social values and attitudes of society. according to this idea, the purposes of this study are to investigate how the advertising language plays the role of attracting attention, stimulating interest, arousing desire and persuading action, which is based on semantics, and to enrich advertising language research in a relatively new perspective. this thesis is composed of five chapters: the first chapter gives readers an outline of the whole paper. it details the achievements made by previous linguists specializing in advertising language research and meanwhile points out the theme of this papersemantic analysis of english advertising. the second chapter leads readers to the general introduction to semantic theory: the definition, the content, the ratiocination and the examples of 中南民族大学硕士学位论文 5theoretical application in daily life. chapter three begins to talk about advertising briefly, which is also a quite comprehensive filed. it tells readers the definition of advertising, the functions of advertising and the classification of advertising. chapter four is the main part of this paper. in the process of reasoning, the author tries to make readers understand the language characters of advertising based on semantic theory and to analyze them through a comparison between the conceptual meaning vs. brand name choice, the associative meaning vs. advertising words writing and the thematic meaning vs. advertising context arrangement. the last chapter is the conclusion of this paper. the author summarizes the above discussion and analysis, points out some limitations and puts forward some new inspirations for further research. an analysis of english ads in the semantic approach 6 chapter 2 semantics 2.1 the definition of semantics semantics is a kind of science, which studies “the meanings of language”. david grystal said: “the meanings of a language are very important for the language. no matter what we consider the language is, it is a meaningful action. the meaning of language is a kind of sign which we use to separate peoples sound and noise”. the meaning of language is a representative of peoples thinking, a general reflection of the object with the help of humans brain, as well as a center of their communication. when people communicate with each other, firstly they want to make themselves understood. when people read articles or talk with each other, they mainly concern about what they want to express. so the meaning of language is the bridge of peoples exchange and mutual understanding. without the meaning, the communication cannot work. semantics can be considered as a level of linguistic description and as a component of linguistics. it is a relatively young field compared with other branches of linguistic study, but it has developed very quickly in the latter part of the 20th century. “study on meanings has been the theme or concern of study in different fields.” in 1974, the