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2. Literature Review
2.1 A Brief Introduction of Puns in English Advertisements
Puns are one of the commonly used rhetorical devices in English advertisements. Puns can attract the reader’s interest and curiosity and then stimulate them to buy products.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word “pun” as: “the use of the word to in a way as to suggest two or more words of the same or nearly the same sound with company’s meanings, so as to produce a humorous effect.” (Simpson & Weiner, 1989: 832) Generally speaking, puns fall into four categories: phonetic pun, semantic pun, grammatical pun and idiomatic pun. These four kinds will be explored to embody the application of puns in English advertisements.
Phonetic pun refers to a pun involving one word with its homophonic word. This type of pun is humorous and funny. For example: Have a nice trip, buy-buy. It’s an advertisement of a duty-free shop in a British airport. “Buy” is homophonic word of “bye”. So, the implied meaning of this advertisement is: Buy some gifts before coming. The Airport shop borrows a phonetic pun to eliminate the embarrassment, and meanwhile reminds passengers to buy some duty-free goods in a witty way. Semantic Pun refers to a pun with one word used twice or more times. For each time, the exact word has a different meaning. This kind of puns can create implicative and artistic conception and thus enhancing the effect of language. For example: Try our sweet corn, and you will smile from ear to ear. Version A: 品尝我们的甜玉米,你会笑得合不拢嘴。Version B：品尝我们的甜玉米,你会笑得合不拢嘴，吃了一穗又一穗。The word “ear” has two meanings. “Ear” can mean “ears” and also mean “wheat”. This advertisement makes good use of the double senses of the word, to intensify an impression that their corns are most delicious. Grammatical puns usually include omitted structure, words or phrases with double or multiple grammatical functions. For example: Which Lager can claim to be truly German? This can. It’s Lager beer advertisement. “Can” can be used as a modal verb, and equals to “may”, but when it’s used as a noun to answer the question, it refers to “tin”. Idiomatic Pun imitates familiar sayings or idioms to attract the attention of readers. For example: Guinness beer advertisement: My Goodness! My Guinness! “Guinness” has two meanings, one is“吉尼斯”, the other one is the beer brand. “My Goodness” is a familiar exclamatory sentence for Chinese. In the advertisement, the latter employs the structure of the familiar exclamatory sentence to arouse people’s curiosity about the word “Guinness” so that it gets easier to remember this product for readers.源Y自Z751W.论~文'网·www.751com.cn
2.2 An Introduction of Relevance Theory
In 1986, Sperber and Wilson firstly proposed the Relevance Theory in Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Relevance Theory has profound impacts on modern pragmatics research. It argues that human communication is an ostensive-inferential communication. “The communicator produces a stimulus which makes it mutually manifest to communicator and audience that the communicator intends, by means of this stimulus, to make manifest or more manifest to the audience a set of assumptions.”（Sperber & Wilson, 2001: 63） In the terms of Relevance Theory, the communication of language is a kind of purposeful and intentional activity. In the process of communication, the speaker provides an ostensive stimulus involving his or her informative intention and communicative intention. According to Blakemore, an ostensive stimulus is optimal relevance when it is relevant enough to be worth the audience’s efforts to process it. (Blakemore, 2002: 28) The task of the audience is making efforts to infer informative intention and communicative intention from the words of the speaker.