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How do we define humorous advertising? Humorous advertising is a more interesting format of advertising. It employs humorous conversations or scenes to make people laugh for the purpose of leaving a deep impression on the public and stimulating their desire for purchasing.
Due to humorous advertising’s popularity, many researchers show their great interest in it. The researches cover many academic fields such as business, psychology, sociology and linguistics. Apart from this, many researchers even study it from the interdisciplinary perspective. At present, the studies on humor focus on the verbal material by means of employing Cooperation Principles and Relevance Theory. This thesis is intended to analyze the humor in Chinese advertisements from the perspective of violating the Cooperative Principle. Hopefully, it may be helpful through the process of designing and understanding of the humor in advertising.
The whole paper is made up of seven sections, and it proceeds in the following ways: Section 1 gives a brief introduction to the thesis topic. Section 2 focuses on previous study on advertising. In Section 3, a brief analysis of advertising is offered: firstly, discussing the definition of advertising, and secondly, exploring the classification of advertising. The definition and general review of humor are given in Section 4. Section 5 is devoted to the Cooperative Principle, including the notion of the CP, specifications of the Cooperative Principle, and violating the CP. Section 6 is the most important part of the thesis, which, with the help of some particular examples, makes a detailed study of the humor in Chinese advertisements in the light of the violation of the four maxims of the CP theory. The author draws a conclusion of the study in the last part.
2. Literature Review源'自:优尔:"论-文'网www.youerw.com
As we all know, advertising rooted in the seventeenth century and became very popular quickly from the very beginning. Due to its unique function, a lots of researchers show great interest in it. Advertising has been studied from many aspects, such as economics, psychology, sociology, etc.
In English in Advertising (1986), Leech describes English advertisements from the aspect of speech sounds, phoneme, grammar and vocabulary, and makes a thorough study of the characteristics and contexts of advertising language. However, Leech doesn’t explain why English advertising appears as what it is.
Barthes has given a semiotic study of advertising language. He holds a belief that information can be conveyed to readers by double systems of codes-the linguistic text and the picture in a simple ad. He believes that these codes will work simultaneously and produce connotations in different processes. But both the linguistic message and the iconic one can’t avoid ambiguity because the explanation of the connotation of codes depends on the viewers’ cultural knowledge.
Geis also investigates into this problem from a linguistic point of view in his work The Language of Television Advertising. It seems that pragmatics is the point of his study.“The communication doesn’t occur successfully until the audiences gain the speaaker’s real meaning of the utterance instead of the linguistic meaning of it. Therefore, the aspect of pragmatics must be employed when talking about the effectiveness of communication.”(Sperber 86). However, he attaches great importance to the ill effects of advertising.
Although many Chinese scholars, such as Huang Guowen and Li Yuee, also have studied on advertisements from different aspects, but the study of Chinese advertising is comparatively scarce. Furthermore, from the above review, it’s not hard to see that people pay much attention to implicatures in advertising language instead of humor phenomenon in advertising. In addition, even though some scholars have showed their interest in humor in Chinese adverting, they scarcely probed into it from the angle of pragmatics. So here the author focuses on humor in Chinese advertising from the perspective of the violation of the Cooperative Principle.