Abstract

With the increasing fierce competition in economic field, advertising, as an effective means of promoting sales, has played a more and more important role. For grabbing the target audience’s attention and stimulate them to purchase the advertised products or services, ads makers usually resort to rhetorical devices as the rhetorical devices are possessed with versatile connotations and strong persuasions. The present study intends to make a comparative study on rhetorical devices in Chinese and English advertising, with a view to shed some lights on the usage and help readers better appreciate the ads. The thesis first takes an in-depth look into advertising and rhetoric in advertising. And then the focus is on the contrastive analysis of the rhetorical devices in Chinese and English ads at three levels: phonetic level, lexical level and syntactic level. Generally speaking, the similarities between use of rhetoric devices in Chinese and English cultures are more prominent than the disparities. As the language and culture are intimately related, the rhetoric device, as a linguistic phenomenon, can be interpreted from the cultural perspective. Therefore, the thesis draws some cultural implications from the disparities in rhetoric devices in advertising. It is found that Chinese and English cultures are different in thinking mode, cultural psychology and aesthetic taste. Based on the research, the conclusion can be drawn that rhetorical devices in advertising are universally identical although there are some slight differences.

Key words: rhetoric; rhetorical devices; advertising; comparative study

摘要

随着商业竞争的日益加剧，广告，作为一种有效的促销手段，发挥了越来越大的作用。修辞手段承载着丰富的内涵和较强的劝说性，因此，为了吸引目标消费者的眼球，刺激消费，广告制作商往往采用修辞手段。本文试图比较探究中英广告中的修辞手段，旨在揭示异同，提高读者对广告的鉴赏水平。本文首先探讨了广告和广告中的修辞。本文重点从语音、词汇和句法三个层面比较分析中英广告中修辞手法的应用，研究表明，相似点较之不同点更为显著。语言和文化紧密相关，因此，修辞手段，作为一种语言现象，也可以从文化角度加以解释。因此，本文探讨了修辞差异所揭示的文化层面的差异，包括思维模式、文化心理和审美情趣。通过研究，本文得出以下结论：尽管在中英广告中修辞手段的应用存在差异，但是基本上相同。

关键词：修辞；修辞手段；广告；比较研究