Understanding Chinese Pun-Based Ads in Taipei Metro Stations: A Cognitive Pragmatic Approach
Date Issued
2010
Date
2010
Author(s)
Chang, Chin-Ning
Abstract
Advertisements have been an indivisible part of modern people’s life for decades. In order to draw attention, advertising language usually embodies many rhetoric devices to bring the receivers into a new sight. Punning is one such device preferred by Chinese ads. However, studies in this regard are scarce. The present thesis is thus devoted to investigating the comprehension process of Chinese pun-based ads complicated by words and images. Our data were all gathered by photographing the billboard ads in all the Taipei metro stations. We collected 396 ads, 101 of which incorporate puns (25.5%), the highest percentage among all the rhetoric devices.
In order to handle well the inputs from different modalities of Chinese pun-based ads, this study adopts Brandt and Brandt’s (2005) blending model as the analytical tool. This model excels in dealing with concepts with inconsistency in a systematic way, illustrating clearly the important pragmatic factors that participate in the recipient’s comprehension process. In our analysis, language and visuals are interpreted in the Input Spaces 1 and 2 respectively. The two interpretations then blend into the Virtual Space if they are related. Eventually, the recipient integrates his background knowledge towards his current situation and obtains the final interpretation in the Meaning Space.
Several advantages support the analysis suggested in the present thesis. First of all, our way of analysis applies to all the Chinese pun-based ads in our database, which means our analysis is re-doable. In addition, each step of the recipient’s comprehension process is clearly presented in illustration, which makes our analysis easy to understand and to follow. Furthermore, for those punning ad captions whose two meanings are not easy to be successfully retrieved, we can ferret out the critical point by adopting our way of analysis.
For the last issue, we identify three major characteristics of Chinese pun-based ads. Firstly, most of the Chinese pun-based ads in our database are created by homophones (60.4%). This is due to the fact that Chinese has “a high incidence of characters with multiple homophones” (Chen et al. 2009). This characteristic also makes Chinese a language convenient to create puns than other languages because the advertisers can search for possible words to pun among more potential candidates of homophones. Secondly, 22 of the 101 pun-based ads (21.8%) in our database are made of Chinese four-character idioms. We argue that making puns with them may well be better anticipated by the target receivers due to cultural factors; besides, the compactness of these idioms with only four characters reinforces the advertisers to pun by them in consideration of saving the advertising space. Lastly, the two meanings of a Chinese punning caption are usually made possible by different grammatical structures. This phenomenon may be closely related to the characteristic that Chinese is not only more flexible in sentence structure but also case-free.
Subjects
pun
advertisemen
blending
multimodality
Chinese characteristics
Type
thesis
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