Abstract

    In current era, advertisement, as a kind of sales manner, has attracted much attention of different people. It plays the role of providing information and persuading customers to purchase products or services. This thesis analyzes the speech acts of specific advertising language from the perspective of Speech Act Theory, aiming to provide help for customers and ad-writers.

Key words: Speech Act Theory, advertising language, direct speech acts, indirect speech acts

摘 要

  在当今时代，广告作为一种销售方式，吸引着众多人的注意力。它的主要功能在于它能够向消费者提供信息且劝说消费者去购买产品或服务。本文基于言语行为理论，通过分析具体广告语的言语行为，旨在为消费者和广告创作人提供帮助。

关键词：言语行为理论；广告语；直接言语行为；间接言语行为

1.    Introduction
     With the development of economy and business, media are filled with all sorts of advertisements. As a kind of marketing tool, advertisement has a great influence on our life. It is known that the ultimate purpose and function of advertisement is to persuade customers to purchase products or services, so advertisers have to strengthen the appealing force of advertisements. An advertisement is composed of many factors and the advertising language is of the greatest importance. This determines that advertising language should have some pragmatic features, such as selling power and attentive value, so as to arouse customers’ desire to buy products or services. Actually, as a special text, its pragmatic characteristics and clear target has determined its lexical, syntactical and rhetorical features. Considering its pragmatic function and features, more and more people begin to pay attention to the uniqueness of advertising language. They have conducted fruitful researches of its features from the perspective of linguistics, translation, sociology, psychology and rhetoric. However, up to now, few researches have been done from the pragmatic angle and these studies are not enough to dig the theoretical value of advertising language. Furthermore, Speech Act Theory is the first important theory in pragmatics. It was advanced by J. Austin in 1960s and further developed by other scholars, especially by Searle. Based on speech act theory, the author decides to analyze the speech acts in advertising language. Thus, audience could understand advertising language and grasp the main information. Besides, ad-writers could also create better advertisements and improve their quality so as to attract audience to purchase products or services.