广告中的指示语

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Chapter One Introduction

Advertising is ubiquitous in modern society. It is something that we are all

exposed to. It would be a miracle if someone goes through all stages of life without

ever encountering advertising. As can be seen in the amazing number and appearing

frequency of advertising, it has attracted and would still attract much interest of

advertisers. The importance advertising obtains in expanding market and developing

economy can never be ignored. With China entering WTO and the globalization of

economy, advertising is becoming increasingly critical.

Advertising takes many forms over mass media, so there are different

classifications in accordance with different criteria (namely, target audience,

geographic area, medium and purpose). For example, advertising classified from the

perspective of purpose, is divided into profit-driven and nonprofit-driven. Among all

these different classifications, there is a something in common, that is, every

advertisement has a certain purpose to fulfill, be it commercial or noncommercial.

As we know, the basic purpose of commercial advertising is to persuade potential

consumers to take the crucial action of purchasing, without which the production of

goods would be woods without roots. Then how to arrive at effective advertising has

become a central topic for advertisers and advertising designers to ponder over.

§1.1 Motivations for Study into Deixis in Advertising

Most print ads consist of words and pictures whereas visual ones frequently are

aided by sound or music. No matter what forms these advertisements take, the

absence of words would undermine the effectiveness of advertising. Therefore, the

question arises as to how words stimulate potential consumers to a better

understanding of advertising. As to this point, it is definite to say that wording of

text designers in one way or another determines the quality of advertisements. With

the deepening research into advertising, the author finds that advertising has been

investigated mainly from the perspective of rhetoric. The fact that few researchers

have studied advertising from the aspect of pragmatics tempts the author to make an

analysis of ads from the point of pragmatics. Based on the findings of previous study

on advertising, the author comes to a viewpoint that advertising discourse has two

distinct features. One is the succinctness of print ads: a high level of complexity

Deixis in Advertising

might frighten the target audience into doubting their comprehension ability, hence

consciously avoid dwelling on the language used in advertising discourse, not to

mention buying the products advertised. The other feature concerns the acceptability

of ads to potential consumers. Inappropriate words in ads might lengthen the

distance between the two poles of advertising, namely advertisers and the target

audience. On these occasions, advertisers would be faced with the danger of

excluding the target audience as outsiders, hence distortion of ads content and

misunderstanding of anticipated aim, which in turn affect the relationship between

these two parties.

One interesting phenomenon, among all the components of advertising, is the

use of deixis. Advertising, if combined with deixis, would generate a great deal of

curiosity and attract attention from all walks of life. This thesis aims at fulfilling

two-fold purposes: one is to help text designers gain insight into deixis in

advertising and therefore produce better ads for the target audience; the other is to

inform the target audience of the fundamentals of deixis in advertising and strike at a

better interpretation of ads.

Deixis has always been one of the most fundamental domains in the research of

pragmatics all along. By means of the deictic words discourses are immediately

associated with specific persons, things, space and time. The lack of relevant

information often hinders the understanding of utterances. So it is safe to say that

deictic information has become a must for the interpretation of utterances in

communication, with ads included.

Deixis is the first area of study in linguistic pragmatics that has caught the

attention of scholars. Many of them have given their thought-provoking suggestions

for understanding deixis. In 1954, Israeli philosopher Yehoshua Bar-Hillel wrote an

article “Indexical expressions”, in which he speculates that most of the declarative

sentences people produce are indexical in that they involve references to the speaker,

the addressee, the time and the place of speaking (1954: 79). Since then the study of

indexicals, or deixis, has always been one of the central topics in pragmatics. In the

article “the Pronouns of Power and Solidarity”, Brown and Gilman (1960) described

the two forms of singular second personal pronoun (T and V) in major European

languages. Which form to be chosen depends on how speakers think about and judge

the relationship between the two parties in communication, which fully shows the

Chapter One Introduction

sociality of person deixis. Charles L. Fillmore analyzed and described the

phenomenon of deixis in a rather comprehensive way. In his Lectures on Deixis

(1971), he explained the concept of deixis by using concise language and described

the five types of deixis concretely. In Green’s Pragmatics and Natural Language

Understanding (1989), he made a description of several deictic terms such as

personal pronouns, aspect of verbs, adverbs, demonstrative pronouns from the

perspective of pragmatics. In Semantics (1997), J. I. Saeed points out that some

expressions will have the same referent across a range of utterances and others have

their referent totally dependent on context. He Ziran (1988, 1997), He Zhaoxiong

(2000), Ran Yongping (2006) and other scholars in China also have made a

considerably detailed study on deixis. They have generally tended to describe deixis

according to their function and contextual parameters they define.

The classifications of deixis into five sub-classes, namely time deixis, person

deixis, spatial deixis, discourse deixis, and social deixis, are generally acknowledged

by these above-mentioned scholars. But in the process of the study, the author finds

that there exists another type of deictic expression in daily life. As to this particular

deixis, Ran Yongping (2006) puts forward the saying of “number deictic

information”, yet he fails to give a definition of it. In this thesis the author attempts

to bring forward a brand-new type of deixis- number deixis, so as to arrive at an

improved classification of deixis and a better understanding of deixis in advertising.

Deixis is of great use to construct the advertising discourse in an efficient way.

With the development of society, advertising occurring in daily life has stepped up to

a new stage. Yet, as far as the quality of advertising is concerned, much work

remains to be done, especially in China where the economic level stays lower than

that of Western countries. In this case, in order to upgrade economic development

and to promote the advertising industry, the elements of advertising, especially the

role of language used in advertising should be probed into. Here, deixis in language

plays the most important role. With a thorough knowledge of deixis, the target

audience can get a better understanding of the advertisers’ intention. Similarly, the

deictic information in the advertising discourse will be important for the target

audience to have an idea of the meaning of advertising.

Deixis in Advertising

§1.2 Organization of This Thesis

In an attempt to make an overall analysis of deixis in advertising, the author

organizes this thesis in five Chapters.

In the first Chapter, studies of deixis are given a brief review to. Research into

deixis done by pioneers is introduced and commented, either at home or abroad. The

author also gives a brief description of present state of advertising in China, which

in turn spurs the author to a further study of advertising. By explaining advertising

from the perspective of deixis, the author intends to guide both the text designers

and the target audience into better mutual understanding.

Chapter Two deals with advertising in itself. The definition of advertising is

first presented so as to give readers of this thesis a clear picture of the subject of

subsequent discussion. Also presented in this chapter is the classification of

advertising according to different criteria, which is followed by the function of

advertising. What is also noticeable in this chapter is the relationship between

advertising and deixis.

In the next Chapter, the author naturally diverts the direction of discussion to

deixis. The egocentricity of deixis is given a special section to investigate for its

unquestionable prominence in understanding the whole thesis. In this chapter, the

first five types of deixis, namely time deixis, person deixis, spatial deixis, discourse

deixis and social deixis are given respective introduction to in traditional linguistic

sense. Following them, another type of deixis is put forward, that is, number deixis.

What follows are the categories of explicit and implicit form of deixis, which

investigate advertising from the perspective of focus of attention.

Chapter Four is devoted to the interpretation of deixis in advertising. To study

this, the author collected a large number of ads and selected the most appropriate 27

as examples to be illustrated. First is a description of the relation between deixis and

frame knowledge in the process of constructing ideal worlds in advertising. Next is a

discussion of the six types of deixis which are successfully used in the ads. Besides,

the reasons for failure in ads are also studied from the aspect of deictic discourse.

Chapter Five highlights the major points of the thesis. Also the application of

deixis in advertising has wide applicability. Text designers may benefit from the

fundamentals of pragmatics: knowledge of deixis might provide a new insight into

how to produce better advertisements. Language learners would also gain fun as

Chapter One Introduction

well as knowledge from the study of deixis in advertising. Language teachers might

employ deixis in advertising as a new topic to guide their teaching into

encompassing various discourses as resources of classroom activity, which might

substitute the traditional teaching material and make their classroom teaching a most

interesting and constructive experience.

Deixis in Advertising

Chapter Two A General View of Advertising

In modern society, advertising is everywhere. We cannot walk down the street,

the shop, watch television, go through our mail, log on to the Internet, read a

newspaper or take a train without encountering it. Whether we are alone, with our

friends or family, or in a crowd, advertising is always with us, if only on the label of

something we are using. At every moment of the day, we are bombarded with

commercial and noncommercial messages. If there were no advertising, a picture of

modern society would be incomplete. Moreover, a large amount of money is spent

on advertising especially in those developed countries. The fact that an increasing

number of countries are paying special attention to advertising spurs the author to

give a detailed introduction so as to lay a solid foundation for a thorough

understanding of advertising.

§2.1 Definition of Advertising

Advertising plays an important role both in marketing and in daily life. In the

marketing chain, it is a major element. Normally, some product or service can be

presented to meet the needs of some customers by means of advertising, like a brand

of coffee which is said to taste good, a certain kind of food which is publicized as

delicious and convenient or a type of insurance which can bring a brighter future to

our children. In a word, the advertisers are always thinking over ways to change the

attitudes of potential customers towards their product, idea or service so as to

increase the potential consumers’ possibilities of taking steps to purchase products or

accepting a certain idea. As to advertising, different people show different attitudes.

Some like it, some dislike it and some show indifference to it. So the definition of

advertising varies according to different perspectives.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Albert Lasker, who today is generally

looked upon as the father of modern advertising, defined advertising as

“salesmanship in print, driven by a reason why” (Arens, 2002). But that was long

before the advent of radio, television or the Internet. The nature and scope of the

business world and advertising were rather limited. A century later, our planet is a

far different place. The nature and needs of business have changed, and so have the

concept and practice of advertising.

Today, definitions of advertising abound. Journalists, for example, might define

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摘要：

ChapterOneIntroduction1ChapterOneIntroductionAdvertisingisubiquitousinmodernsociety.Itissomethingthatweareallexposedto.Itwouldbeamiracleifsomeonegoesthroughallstagesoflifewithouteverencounteringadvertising.Ascanbeseenintheamazingnumberandappearingfrequencyofadvertising,ithasattractedandwouldstillatt...

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