Abstract

With the rapid development of commodity economy, more and more advertising language floods into people’s daily life. Advertising is playing an important role in modern commercial society. As English is the common language spoken in many countries, it makes advertising English have a far-reaching influence. Advertising English has its own individuality. In order to persuade customers, the language of advertising English must be forceful and effective enough to attract their attentions, to arouse their interests and to encourage their purchasing actions. Meanwhile, as people’s living standards have greatly improved, they would concern more about the quality of their food. As a result, food advertising language must be more careful to follow the inner world of their target customers so that their ads would be more effective. To look into its features deeply, adaptation theory, Leech’s politeness theory and Grice’s cooperative principle are used to illustrate. Adaptation theory emphasizes speakers’ adaptation to the context, so in the design of food advertising language, advertisers should give full consideration to the targeted audience’s inner world, like the elderly, women and children. British linguist Leech’s politeness principle puts emphasis on the importance of politeness. How to become more polite and catering to the consumer are also to be noticed by food advertising language. American linguist Grice pointed out that in cooperative principle, in order to ensure the smooth progress of session, both parties must abide by some principles, which in food advertising means the adaptation to consumers. By combining the above food advertising language pragmatics features, we can further understand not only how to design a good food advertisement to attract consumers and the purpose of promoting products, but also make some contribution to China’s exporting trade development.

Key words: advertising, adaptation, politeness theory, cooperative principle

Contents

Abstract

中文摘要

1 Introduction1

2 Language adaptation theory in food advertising language2

2.1 Adaptation to the mental world4

2.2 Adaptation to the social world.4

2.3 Adaptation to the physical world .5

3 Leech's politeness theory and food advertising language5

4 Cooperative principles in food advertising language8

4.1 Violation of quantity10

4.2 Violation of quality10

4.3 Violation of relation11

4.4 Violation of manner11

5 Conclusion12

References14