摘 要

广告在人类社会发展中的有一段历史了，广告的目的是为了吸引消费者的注意，从而说服其产生购买行为。为了达到这个目的并且使他们的产品成为最畅销的，广告商应该充分润色广告语言。本文试图从广告的早期研究和该自身特点来研究广告，同时也从双关的特点，分类和效果来研究广告。基于两者的研究从相关广告实例中来探索两者间的关系。我们希望该研究能使消费者更好地理解广告，于此同时也为广告创作人提供有益的帮助、参考。

关键词：双关语特征，双关语分类，双关语效果，广告

Contents

1. Introduction..............................................................................................................1
2. Demonstration..........................................................................................................3

2.1 Advertisement...........................................................................................................3

2.2 Pun............................................................................................................................5

2.2.1 The definition of pun.............................................................................................5

2.2.2 Features of pun......................................................................................................6

2.3 Types of pun in advertisement..................................................................................7

2.3.1 Homophonic pun...................................................................................................7

2.3.2 Semantic pun.........................................................................................................8

2.3.3 Idomatic pun and proverbial pun...........................................................................8

2.3.4 Grammatical pun...................................................................................................9

2.4 The effects of the pun in advertisement.................................................................10

2.4.1 Increase the attraction of the advertisement........................................................10

2.4.2 Improve the expressiveness of the advertisement...............................................10

2.4.3 Reduce the fabricating cost of the advertisement................................................11

2.4.4 Reflect the artistry of the advertisement..............................................................11

3. Conclusion................................................................................................................12

Works Cited..................................................................................................................14

Bibliography.................................................................................................................15

Study on the Effects of pun in the English Advertisements

1. Introduction

With the development of society and economy, as we all know, advertisements have been infiltrating through every coner of society and have become one of the essential parts in people’s daily life. No matter it is business advertisement or non-profiadvertisement, advertisement making is a kind of art. This art needs much more skills and methods than other arts do, for it is the combination of sociology, aesthetics, psychology, marketing, literature and linguistics.

Although relatively advertising has a short history of only one hundred years, the study of advertising language has been conducted by scholars both at home and abroad have used different theories to analyze advertisement and achieved significant achievements, such as G. N. Leech (1966), G. Cook (1992) and Huang Guowen (2001) have studied the language of advertising from different perspectives and have made some fruitful findings. Abroad, the most influential study of advertising language is Leech, in 1966, published English in Advertising: A Linguistic Study of Advertising in Great Britain. At home, Guowen, in 2001s, published Theory and Practice of Discourse Analysis: A Study in Advertising Discourse. However, although so many people have researched advertising language, it is limited to the appreciation of art, rhetorical comment and writing techniques, few people explore its theoretical value. So, to achieve the result of passing information on and promoting sales, theoretical strategy as the most basic and widely used means is necessarily employed in advertising.

The success of an advertisement can use AIDMA psychological effect (Attention, Interest, Desire, Memory, Action) (Fengcui Hua, 2005: 100) as the basis to judge whether the advertisement is successfully grab attention, arouse interest, evoke consumer desire for convenience memory and promote consumer behavior. So it also determines the basic language features of English advertisements. In vocabulary, advertisers would like to magically use techniques such as positive adjectives, short and simple words, personal pronoun, or a number of compounds to make advertisements have strong pertinence, so as to catch consumers’ eyes. While in sentence, advertisers are more inclined to use phrases instead of entire saying. Although somentimes long sentences may be implied, it always gives priority to imperative sentences. In general, advertisement as a kind of special practical language, the aspects of wording, grammar are new and unique(Zhang Jian: 1995:75-76). In particular, pun is a common rhetorical device in advertisement. Pun as a rhetorical device was firstly used by Johnden. As far back as 2000s, Aristotle had instituted the implication of pun in his Rhetoric.

Pun involves a variety of different types of word games which collectively referred to as “pun” in rhetoric.(Western Style dictionary 2004:265). Belgium scholar classified pun into four types, they are homonymy, homophony, homography, paronymy. Then, each type is divided into vertical pun- two meanings appear at the same time; horizontal pun- two meanings appear separately. Dalabastita’s taxonomy doesn’t have strong specificity, that is to say, this theory not only can be implied into the translation of English language and European language, but also can be used to translation between Chinese language and English language (Delabastita 1987: 145-146). American scholar Archibald A. Hill put forward the three conditions of pun, that is Double context, Hinge and Tigger (Li Xinghua, 2000:195). Therefore, this thesis tries to analyze advertisement from the perspective of the thetortic of pun. It will give an analysis of advertising language and in the application of pun from the perspective of the features, types and effects of pun. It is divided into five parts: Part one gives an introduction of the advertisement. Part two provides a brief introduction of the definition and features of pun, Part three analyzes the main four types of pun in advertisement by examples. Part four explains the effects of pun in advertisement by analyzing some examples in daily life. The last part is the conclusion of this thesis.

2.Demonstration