修辞学角度下的女性商品广告的语言分析(2)
1.1 Research Background
Advertising plays a very important role in the modern business activities, and we can say advertising is the key to success in the business war. In recent years, many domestic scholars have made some achievements in advertising (including English and Chinese advertising). There are many carefully designed advertisements, specifically for women. However, there is few scholars involving such female advertising research. Therefore, this paper will focus on the analysis of the rhetoric devices of female advertising, so as to understand this kind of advertising well.
In the last ten years, scholars of rhetoric study field focused on the utilization of rhetoric. There were the largest number of papers and achievements in this aspect, which were mainly the comprehensive research of rhetoric and case study. In addition, Mr. Chen Wangdao said," the most important aim of rhetoric is to adapt to the situation "(1932:102), in which the “situation” is the so-called language environment. In "The General Theory of Rhetoric”, Wang Xijie (1996:15) also stressed that "the language environment is the life of rhetoric and there’s no rhetoric outside of the language environment." "All the rhetoric phenomenon can only occur in the particular language surroundings".
Using the theory of the general rhetoric study has always been under the great attention of scholars. Among them, Xie Chunrong takes general rhetoric view as a guide, with the breakthrough point of rhetoric illusion, who uses linguistics, communication, psychology, logic, and other disciplines theory knowledge to reveal the main causes and the specific means of manufacturing illusion.(2004:7) He provided a new point of view for the research of advertising language rhetoric.
The rhetoric devices used in advertising language is the common phenomenon of advertising creation currently. Many scholars have made researches in advertising language rhetoric. Since the 1980s, the research of advertising language became to appear in the society. Advertising language in this period pays more attention to the introduction of products’ features and functions. According to investigation, there were about 55 papers in advertising language and the advertising language thesis in this period occupies only 2.9% of all the collected papers. Then after several years, the scholars in advertising area and linguistic area began to probe into the structural form and expression ways of advertising language. From then on, social linguistics, psychological linguistics and communication linguistics were applied in creating advertising language. The number of the papers began to increase a lot. There were about 222 papers which occupied 11.9% of all in the year of 1995.
There were many typical achievements in last ten years. The novelty of the advertising language is its unique words and means used in choosing sentences. Different choices of sentences cause different expression effects. Zhang MeiAn made the detailed analysis on advertising language rhetoric in a text(2002:2). Shen YaHui, from the point that advertising language itself has the features of personality, creative design, thoughts, conciseness and vividness, thought “one advertisement can defeat others by a surprise action through selecting unique words and tempering sentences "(2006:4). In addition, there were many other research achievements in the advertising language. Xu Fang listed ten the most common advertising figures of speech (2006:1). Many other scholars also paid attention to advertising language figures of speech.
In this thesis I will focus on the rhetoric figures of speech applied in female advertising language and the features of female advertising language. So I can show the great charm of female advertising which makes full use of rhetoric devices.
1.2 Research Design
The method of advertising linguistics will be taken in this paper to survey the effects on people's consumption orientation made by rhetoric of advertising language, especially that of the female advertising language. The linguistic data applied in the analysis comes from TV, journals, subject books, newspaper, etc. And the number of the advertisements and examples applied in the analysis of this paper will be around 30. Qualitative method and quantitative method will be taken in this study to classify the collected advertisements. Then the role and impact of advertisements used in media will be discussed which is based on the analysis of rhetoric. English and Chinese female advertising language will be taken as linguistic materials in this paper to search the features and charm of female advertising language, which is mainly from the perspective of rhetoric devices and rhetoric characteristics.