The Application of Relevance Theory and Fuzzy Theory in Advertising Slogans

Abstract
As people’s living standards promotes, and the products are being marketed, the advertisers should give consideration to the sales strategies and techniques. They hope they can use various ways to stimulate the customers to buy the products. As a very effective and convenient sales method, advertisements are accepted by more and more people. Because of the advancement of advertising, people pay more attention to the advertisements’ contents and techniques. Advertisements are not only a pure sales method, but also a cultural phenomenon. As main bodies in advertisements, advertising slogans have a highly important position, and the quality of the slogans is the determinant of the advertisements’ quality. The advertisers always want to use special slogans to attract the audiences and make the various slogans become popular in our daily lives. The question that why the advertising slogans can attract the audiences, has also been discussed by many experts.

This thesis wants to research the advertising slogans under the guidance of relevance theory and fuzzy theory. As a very popular concept, which is frequently used in advertisements, relevance theory emphasizes the ostensive-inferential communication and supports the opinion that when the new information combines with the old information, the contextual effect and maximal relevance will come out. The audiences can acquire the informative intention and communicative intention in the communication process.

Fuzzy theory uses the fuzzy words and sentences to communicate when the advertising slogans can’t offer the accurate words or sentences.

Many experts and scholars use relevance theory or fuzzy theory separately to analyze advertising slogans, but few of experts use these theories to research the significance of advertising simultaneously.

This thesis will use these two theories to analyze some advertising slogans, and prove that these two theories can be applied to the slogans at the same time. These two theories will have interactions and can produce the communicative efficacities.

Key words: relevance theory, fuzzy theory, advertising slogans