Relevance, Emotions, and Poetic Effects in Advertising Language

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the dialogic relations between form and function in advertising discourse by looking into contemporary Chinese advertising language. The rhetorical strategies of syntactic parallelism and repetition of name and metaphor are artfully manipulated through literary styles within the ads to attract the audience's attention, to trigger cognitive poetic effects and advertising literariness, and to perform diverse communicative functions. They convey too the dominant ideologies, viz. intellectualism, elitism, social critique of taste, friends' rapport, feminine awakening, humanistic concern, and the current lifestyles of petits bourgeoisie in urban contexts. The chosen data vastly adopt elegant wordings and stylistic patterns from names of person (artist/writer/poet/celebrity), place, literature, fashion and brand names to produce aesthetic value. They invite/encourage an active/imaginative audience to consume the texts and spell out a variety of weak implicatures involving feelings, attitudes, emotions and impressions along these textual lines, fairly invisibly persuade her to recognise the significant inter-/cultural values. Positioning the audience as social elite and shaping the corporate image/brand as a cultural polysemy and landmark of cultural empowerment, also they initiate an emergent text genre with communicative innovation in cultural industry and academic disciplines.