（英语语言文学专业论文）汉语广告语言中成语模因的语用分析.pdf

vi 摘 要 摘 要 广告是一种说服艺术，它简洁、通俗、生动、新奇。成语则是汉语词汇中重要的组 成部分，是历史的产物和语言的精华。广告设计者之所以将人们熟知的成语嵌入到广告 语中，其目的是为了引起受众的注意，进入其记忆并使其受到感染，最终获得受众的接 受和认同。在前人研究的基础上，本文采用了定量研究方法试图对汉语广告语言中成语 模因进行研究。在模因论和顺应论框架下，本文着重讨论了汉语广告中成语模因的传播 方式，探究了其成功传播所应具备的属性以及影响其有效传播的语境顺应因素。 模因论是基于达尔文进化论的观点解释文化进化规律的新理论。 作为文化传播的基 本单位，模因寓于语言之中，语言本身就是模因。从模因论的角度上讲，汉语广告中的 成语其实也是一种模因形式，它的复制和传播方式与模因的传播方式密不可分。基于何 自然教授的语言模因传播模式，通过对从有影响力的大众传媒中选取的语料的分析，本 文探索性的提出了汉语广告语言中成语模因的传播方式，即内容相同形式各异传播、形 式相同内容各异传播和变序传播。 那么在大众新闻传播中， 促使广告语言广泛流传的成语模因所具备的特有属性是什 么呢？在 heylighen (1998) 的模因选择标准的基础上，本研究提出了汉语广告语言中成 语模因的特有属性，即成语模因的区别性、新颖性、简易性、关联性和一致性。研究表 明，具备以上五个特征的成语模因将会在大众中得以广泛传播。 为验证这些属性的可取性， 本文对汉语广告语言中成语模因的语境顺应因素进行具 体的论证。在顺应论和模因论的框架下，文中归结出成语模因生存环境中影响其复制和 传播的三大因素，即认知因素、情感因素和文化因素。顺应认知因素包括顺应受众的记 忆规律以及顺应其感知方式；简易性、新颖性、区别性和关联性是顺应公众认知因素的 结果。 根据 maslow (1943) 的需要层次理论和 brodie (1996) 的情感热键， 顺应情感因素 包含第一层次情感热键和第二层次情感热键； 关联性和简易性是顺应公众情感因素的结 果。顺应文化因素主要包括顺应受众的民族心理、道德伦理标准以及思维方式；一致性 是顺应公众文化因素的结果。以上研究表明，成功的汉语广告语言中的成语模因受到大 众认知、 情感、 文化因素的影响， 成语模因所具备的属性正是对这三个因素适应的结果。 vii 本研究拓宽了模因论的研究范围，将模因论和广告中的成语紧密联系起来，从而为 广告创作人提供了更广泛的创作空间；此外，本文还加强了公众对汉语广告语言中成语 的认识，为人们理解成语变异提供一些有益的启示。 关键词：汉语广告 成语模因 语用分析 属性 语境顺应因素 iv abstract the advertising is a kind of persuading or convincing art, which is of simplicity, vividness and novelty. most idioms are usually derived from the old scriptures or peoples experiences so that chinese people are familiar with them. so the advertiser imports idioms into advertising language in order to arouse publics attention and get great profit for the business. in the light of this phenomenon, adopting qualitative research methodology, this thesis attempts to make a comprehensive study on idioms as memes in chinese advertisement on the basis of memetics and adaptation theory, such as discussing the memetic transmission mode of idioms in chinese advertisement, identifying the properties of strong idiom memes in advertising, and exploring the primary contextual correlates of adaptability for idiom memes in chinese advertisement. memetics is a new theory for interpreting cultural evolution. as a unit of cultural transmission, meme is an accelerate of language evolution and at the meantime, language is a device to spread memes. speaking from memetics, the idioms in advertising can be considered as memes, and its replication and transmission is also relevant to the memetic transmission. in the thesis, by analyzing samples of idioms in chinese advertisement taken from influential mass media, the author proposes the memetic transmission mode of idioms in chinese advertisement on the basis of he zirans (2005) transmission mode for language memes, including vertical-progressional transmission, horizontal-extensional transmission and sequential-changeable transmission. in the world of mass communication, what are the properties of idiom memes that contribute to the strong replication and transmission of the advertising language? in the present study, based on the selection criteria proposed by heylighen (1998), the author identifies five memetic properties of idioms in chinese advertisement, i.e. distinctiveness, novelty, simplicity, coherence, and conformity. it is found that such idiom memes which are of the five properties will be replicated and disseminated more popularly and successfully among the public. to justify the memetic properties of idioms, the thesis goes on to explore the primary contextual correlates of adaptability for idiom memes in chinese advertisement. within the v framework of verschuerens adaptation theory (2000) and memetics, the author argues that the primary contextual correlates of adaptability for idiom memes in chinese advertisement contain the cognitive, emotive and cultural factors. for the adaptation to the cognitive factors, working memory and the audiences way of perceiving and understanding are taken into consideration and it is found that the simplicity, novelty, distinctiveness as well as coherence are the result of the adaptation to the publics cognitive factors. according to the adaptation to the emotive factors, the author introduces maslows (1943) pyramid and makes a discussion on the emotional “buttons” from two aspects, i.e. primary-order feeling buttons and second-order feeling buttons, which are proposed by brodie in 1996. it is obvious that coherence, together with simplicity, is the result of adaptation to the audiences emotive factors. as far as the adaptation to the cultural factors, it involves peoples national psychology, moral and ethical standards and thinking modes. in the meantime, it is found that conformity, which helps idiom memes in chinese advertisement be assimilated and remembered widely and chronically, is the consequence of adaptation to the consumers cultural factors. in a word, it is obvious that the idiom memes are influenced greatly by cognitive, emotive and cultural factors in the process of dissemination, and the five properties of idiom memes in chinese advertising are just the consequence of adaptation to these three factors. this thesis extends the scope of memetic research, makes a close connection of memetics and idioms in chinese advertisement, provides broader advertising space for the advertisers, and enhances peoples comprehension for chinese idioms in advertising language, especially for the understanding of idiom variation. key words: chinese advertisement idiom memes pragmatic analysis properties contextual correlates of adaptability viii list of figures and tables figure 3.1 transmission mode for language memes (he ziran, 2005).22 figure 3.2 memetic transmission mode for idioms in chinese advertisement.22 table 3.1 the main selection criteria for memes (heylighen, 1998: 5).23 figure 3.3 contextual correlates of adaptability (verschueren, 2000: 76).26 figure 6.1 abraham maslows pyramid (maslow, 1943).56 iii 学位论文原创性声明 学位论文原创性声明 本人所提交的学位论文 “a pragmatic analysis of idioms as memes in chinese advertisement”，是在导师的指导下，独立进行研究工作所取得的原创性成果。除文中 已经注明引用的内容外， 本论文不包含任何其他个人或集体已经发表或撰写过的研究成 果。对本文的研究做出重要贡献的个人和集体，均已在文中标明。 本声明的法律后果由本人承担。 论文作者（签名） ： 指导教师确认（签名） ： 年 月 日 年 月 日 学位论文版权使用授权书 学位论文版权使用授权书 本学位论文作者完全了解河北师范大学有权保留并向国家有关部门或机构送交学 位论文的复印件和磁盘，允许论文被查阅和借阅。本人授权河北师范大学可以将学位论 文的全部或部分内容编入有关数据库进行检索，可以采用影印、缩印或其它复制手段保 存、汇编学位论文。 （保密的学位论文在 年解密后适用本授权书） 论文作者（签名） ： 指导教师（签名） ： 年 月 日 年 月 日 1 chapter one introduction this chapter presents a general introduction including the aims, significance, data collection and research methodology as well as the organization of the present study. 1.1 aims of the present study in modern society, advertising becomes more and more popular. it is no surprise that advertising, just like the air, has penetrated peoples life and made their life more interesting and happier. remarkably, the soul of advertisement is the language, that is, the perfect advertising language is the key to the success of an advertisement. according to the dictionary, chinese idiom, used by people for a long time, refers to a phrase whose meaning is concise and insightful and which must be learnt as a whole unit. most of idioms are usually derived from the old scriptures or peoples experiences so that chinese people are very familiar with them. so the advertiser imports idioms into advertising language in order to arouse publics attention and obtain great profit for the business. memetics, based on darwins theory of evolution, is a new theory to explain the laws of cultural evolution. it starts and develops since 1976 when richard dawkins proposed the term “meme” in his book the selfish genes. memetics has introduced the replication of information into language and plays a crucial role in the study of language and culture, especially the social evolution of language and the communication of language. as mentioned above, the present study aims to make a comprehensive discussion on idioms as memes in chinese advertisement on the basis of memtics and adaptation theory. more specifically, three research questions are proposed as follows: (1) following the transmission mode, how can the idiom memes be transmitted in chinese advertisement? (2) what are the properties of the idiom memes that contribute to the strong replication and transmission of the advertising language? (3) what are the primary contextual correlates of adaptability for idiom memes in chinese advertisement? and how do the idiom memes adapt to these factors in the process of transmission? 2 1.2 significance of the present study the rationale and significance of this thesis can be summarized as follows: to begin with, advertising becomes more and more crucial and popular in the daily life and many researchers have studied it from different points of view such as semiotics, linguistics, rhetoric and pragmatics. in the meantime, idioms in the advertising language have been got researchers attention more and more. however, it exists the limited application of pragmatic theories. most of researchers draw their attention to relevance theory or conversational implicature to analyze the advertising idioms especially puns. little attention is paid to the idioms in advertisement within the framework of other pragmatic theories. so it is looked forward to making a further study on advertising from the perspective of another pragmatic theory, namely, memetics. in addition, memetics is the study of meme which was proposed by dawkins in 1976. it is a relatively new pragmatic theory and recognized and studied by chinese scholars until 2000. on the one hand, although memetic research becomes more and more popular both abroad and in china and it is connected closely with advertising language recently, most of scholars explore advertising language memes in the broad sense. on the other hand, the adverting language has been studied in various aspects related to memetics, such as translation and meme, intertexuality and meme, strong memes in advertising language and so on, but there are few, or at least within the authors knowledge, research being carried out on the idioms in advertising language related to memetics, let alone the specific study of idioms as memes in chinese advertisement in the m.a. thesis. whats more, the investigation of idioms as memes in chinese advertisement can help people to gain some understanding of chinese culture and of how culture knowledge is transmitted in a memetic way. therefore, the pragmatic analysis of idioms as memes in chinese advertising language is absolutely needed. as a result, the present study extends the scope of memetic research and makes a close connection of memetics and idioms in chinese advertisement so that it provides broader advertising space for the advertisers. in the meantime, this research enhances peoples comprehension for chinese idioms in advertising language, especially for the understanding 3 of idiom variation. 1.3 data collection and research methodology according to its aims, the present study mainly adopts qualitative research methodology, in which the sufficient and necessary data collection plays an important role. in this thesis, totally 79 samples of advertising, which are numbered from 1 to 79 in the appendix, are taken from influential mass media such as magazines, advertising books, websites, etc. there are mainly two principles the author follows to select the data so as to make the present study convincing. on the one hand, the advertisements selected must be composed of idioms properly. on the other hand, the selected data should be all well-known and successful advertisements in a certain period, that is, these advertisements are of strong attention value and memory value so that they can be easily accepted and memorized by public. since the author is relatively familiar with the chinese idioms, the data collected in this thesis are chinese advertisements which correspond with the above-mentioned principles. 1.4 organization of the thesis this thesis consists of seven chapters as below: chapter one is a general introduction to this thesis, including the aims, significance, data collection and research methodology as well as the organization of the present study. chapter two is a detailed review of the related researches. it presents the previous studies on advertising and idioms in advertising as well as previous memetic studies on advertising in particular. chapter three contributes to exploration of the theoretical foundation for the present study. after a general overview of memetics, the memetic transmission mode and memetic selection criteria is discussed respectively. furthermore, the primary contextual correlates of adaptability for idiom memes is purposed on the basis of verschuerens (2000) adaptation theory. based on the theoretical foundation contrusted in chapter three, the next three chapters, in which the emphasis of the thesis lies, are dedicated to the vivid analysis of idioms as memes in chinese advertisement step by step. 4 chapter four identifies how the idiom memes are transmitted in chinese advertisement with analyzing examples in datail and intends to explore the reasons why the idiom memes can be transmitted more quickly and powerfully than other expressions in advertising language. chapter five makes a further study on reasons why such idiom memes can be replicated and disseminated more successfully. based on heylighens (1998) selection criteria, the properties of idiom memes in chinese advertisement are elaborated with detailed examples. chapter six goes on to explore the process of adaptation for idiom memes in chinese advertisement from the perspective of cognition, emotion and culture so as to justify for the memetic properties of idiom memes. chapter seven, as the last part of the thesis, concludes the major findings, together with limitations, of the present study as well as gives some suggestions for further research in the similar domain. 5 chapter two literature review the research topic is idioms as memes in chinese advertisement, so it is significant to review previous studies on idioms, advertising as well as memetics. more specifically, a review of previous studies on advertising and idioms in advertising will be presented respectively in section 2.1 and 2.2. furthermore, previous memetic studies on advertising will be reviewed in section 2.3. 2.1 previous studies on advertising nowadays, advertisement appears everywhere in our daily life. the market economy, to some extent, can be called the advertising economy. there are various kinds of advertisements in newspapers and magazines, on the internet, radio and tv, even on the t-shirts. it is no surprise that advertising, just like the air, has penetrated our life and made our life more interesting and happier. some of the advertisements are so excellent that readers can not forget them at the first watching or hearing. because of the successful advertising, the merchandise will get peoples high attention and reach the unexpected and satisfying effect. in a word, the power of the advertising is infinite. however, the soul of advertisement is the language. it is the most significant factor in the advertisement. there is a saying to describe the crucial importance of the advertisement: the perfect advertising language is the key to the success of an advertisement (bai guang, 2003). therefore, it is necessary to introduce some basic factors of adverting language first so as to make readers understand better the approaches analyzed in the following sections. definitions of advertising the english word “advertising” derives from the latin word “advertere”, which means “giving notice to someone of something”, “getting ones attention”, or “paying more attention to something”. there are various definitions of advertising and each one has its own characteristics. as far as the author is concerned, the most popular and widely cited definition is proposed by american marketing association (ama), “advertising is the non-personal communication of information usually paid for and usually persuasive in nature about products, services, or ideas by identified sponsors through the various media.” (bovee the coded iconic message which refers to the picture forming the connotation of the product image; and 8 non-coded iconic message, in which the image denotes the real object visually. to some extent, barthes makes contribution to the semiotics and its application in the process of analyzing the advertisements. another scholar, who studies advertisement from the semiotic standpoint, is judith williamson (1983). she proposes two valid systems in comprehending advertisement: the manifest level and the latent level. in her opinion, she realizes that an advertisement is not only understood with encoding and decoding but also interpreted by the audiences relevant knowledge. in other words, it needs audiences to make appropriate connections. just as what she says, “this transference of significance does not exist as completed in the ad, but requires us to make the connection” (williamson, 1983: 19). but there is a big problem of her research. the audiences can not determine which interpretation should be applied at what level when the timing comes. 2.1.2 the linguistic approach in this section, the linguistic approach will be reviewed in the narrow sense because the author aims to focus on the language features of the advertisement. geoffrey n. leech is one of the earliest and most famous linguists. based partly on his m.a. thesis, leech published a book entitled english in advertising: a linguistic study of advertising in great britain in 1966. in the book, leech lists the most popular and frequently-used wor