Discourse analysis began in the 1920s and 1930s and flourished in the 1960s. Discourse analysis theory is used to explain various discourse types because of its powerful generalization and explanatory power. This paper mainly summarizes the research status of discourse analysis theory in the field of advertising English, and analyzes the scope, related topics, existing problems and development prospects of this research.
A Study on Discourse Analysis of Keyword Advertising Discourse
I. Introduction
Discourse analysis is still a new discipline. As early as the 1920s and 1930s, linguists turned their attention to the study of languages in use. Prague School and London School are the theoretical schools that came into contact with this field earlier. By the 1960s, this subject had gradually developed. Discourse analysis combines the theories of linguistics, semiotics, psychology, anthropology, sociology and literature (Guo-Wen Huang), and becomes a discipline specializing in language in communication.
Although discourse analysis has made great progress in recent years, it is far from mature, and theorists are actively exploring this field. As far as the concept of discourse is concerned, different linguists have different views. Some linguists refer to both written and spoken language. Some linguists believe that discourse can only refer to written language, excluding spoken language. Generally speaking, linguists agree that discourse is a natural language in use, in a certain context. On the other hand, discourse analysis studies the language in communication. "It involves the relationship between language and its use situation (that is, context)" (Guo-Wen Huang).
The content of discourse analysis is varied, which can study the cohesion, coherence, inter-sentence relationship and structure of discourse. It can also be studied from phonetics, vocabulary, syntax, discourse and direction plane.
Second, discourse and advertising discourse
Although different scholars have different definitions of discourse, on the whole, scholars have reached a consensus in some fields. In their view, discourse is a linguistic unit that expresses semantics in natural language in a certain context. Advertising, whether oral or written, conforms to this definition, so it can be studied as a unit of advertising discourse. Although at present, advertising attracts audiences by means of images, in essence, advertising is still an activity that applies natural language to a specific environment. It is feasible and well-founded to take advertising discourse as the research unit.
Many linguists are actively exploring in this field. Conversation principle and systemic functional grammar are widely used in the analysis. Some scholars have summarized the rhetoric, lexical features, syntactic features and stylistic functions of advertisements from the perspective of stylistics. Other scholars study the female images in advertisements and the embodiment of cultural differences between China and the West from a cultural perspective. In addition, some scholars combine aesthetics and psychology to sum up many characteristics of English advertisements, and the results are quite famous.
Third, the advertising discourse research overview
1. Overall research situation
According to the statistics of the full-text database of China Academic Journal Network (1994-2004), about 40 articles on discourse analysis of advertising discourse have been published. The distribution of quantity and year is as follows:
As can be seen from the above table, the study of advertising discourse has not been fully developed until recently, and has attracted enough attention from linguists. 2. The study of advertising discourse can be summarized as the following topics.
(1) The combination of advertising discourse and pragmatic theory. With the development of pragmatics, this kind of research is increasing gradually. The combination of advertising discourse and stylistics. The combination of advertising discourse and cognitive psychology. The research results of this subject are relatively few. The combination of advertising discourse and cultural context research.
(2) Since the 1990s, experts and scholars in China have conducted systematic and in-depth discussions on the above four topics, involving the following specific issues: the application of conversation principle in advertising discourse, testimony words in advertising discourse, narrative structure of advertising discourse, the application of register theory in advertising discourse, the application of three non-functional theories in advertising discourse, the application of genre theory in advertising discourse, lexical and syntactic features in advertising discourse, and rhetorical features in advertising discourse.
3. Through the research on more than ten specific topics of the above four topics, scholars have reached an agreement on the following issues.
(1) Advertising is the use of natural language in a certain context, and its textual features can be analyzed by my discourse analysis theory. Conversation theory, tenor and register theory can all be used to analyze the characteristics of advertising texts. In addition, systemic functional theory has strong theoretical tension and can be used to explain and analyze various features in a text.
(2) In terms of vocabulary and syntax, scholars agree that advertising style is colloquial and sentences are simple. The sentence structure is relatively simple. There are generally no clauses, and some sentences have no verbs. Lexically, there are many compound words; The internal structure of words is relatively simple. Most of the words used are positive and positive. Proper nouns appear more frequently.
(3) In terms of rhetorical devices, linguists agree that producers will use a lot of rhetorical devices, such as alliteration, parallelism and exaggeration.
Four, the main problems existing in the current research
As far as the current research situation is concerned, the distribution of topics is uneven. For example, stylistics has attracted a lot of attention. All fields of stylistics have attracted scholars' attention and been fully studied. Many linguists pay attention to the analysis of lexical, syntactic and rhetorical features.
Besides stylistics, pragmatic analysis of advertising discourse is also one of the focuses of research. Among them, systemic functional grammar theory is widely used in the analysis of advertising discourse. Such as tenor and register theory.
But the main achievements are limited to this, and we have gained little from other topics. Few people pay attention to analyzing advertising discourse from the perspective of cognitive theory and culture.
Fifth, the prospect of advertising discourse research.
With the deepening of human research on computer, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, cognitive psychology and other disciplines, cognitive models and cognitive processes have attracted more and more attention from foreign language circles in China. In the next few years, the combination of advertising discourse and cognitive theory will have greater vitality. In addition, with the increasingly close international communication, the combination of cultural context and advertising discourse will also have a great theoretical space. The combination of pragmatics and advertising discourse will also have great room for development. Among them, systemic functional theory has a strong theoretical tension and can be more combined with advertising discourse. Although the stylistic features of advertising discourse have been fully analyzed, this does not mean that there is no room for analysis. The stylistic variation analysis of advertising discourse still has great room for development.
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