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2. Literature Review
Pun in Dictionary of English Language is defined as “a witticism, involving the use of a word with more than one meaning, or of words having the same, or nearly the same sound but different meanings”(Wang Jing,2012:178).Generally speaking, “a pun is the saying of one word or sentence that contains more than one meaning. Pun can be regarded as a kind of word game and is illustrated in advertisements.”
Pun has two main features. The first feature of puns is polysemy in semantic level. It refers to the inpidual language having two or more than two kinds of cognitive languages. For example:“ What kinds of money do girls like the most?” -- Matrimony. The mony’s pronunciation is similar to the word “money”, this is seen as a homophones pun. Another important feature of pun is double context. For example,when people sitting in a restaurant asked: “Do you serve spirits here?” The waiter said: “Sure, sit down, we serve anybody.” It is clear that the customer and the waiter have their own speaking background environment.文献综述
Considering that this is an important role and service to attract the audience's attention and persuade people to accept the products, more and more studies have been carried out to advertising language. Considering the universality of puns in advertisements，the research of them has an important realistic significance. On the one hand, it will provide a theoretical framework and guiding principles to advertisers and help them make better applications of puns in advertisements. On the other hand, the audience can benefit from the research for a better understanding of puns in advertisements. In addition, this study may help arouse people’s interest in puns in advertising，and encourage them to join in this meaningful advertising application.
Relevance theory, proposed by Sperber and Wilson in the mid-1980s, is the basis of the correct understanding of semantics and any language exchanged to communicate is a process of searching for optimal relevance principle. It is theoretical hypotheses are also appropriate for pun interpretation, by analyzing puns in this study, we find that the pun interpretation seems more complicated due to its specific features. The speaker need to express his ideas clearly and the listener need to understand the conversation in both sides of the cognitive context environment. So optimal relevance can grasp the true meaning of the utterance to get the communicative purpose.