论文总字数：32524字

摘 要

广告已经渗透到社会的每一个角落，逐渐成为人们日常生活中不可或缺的部分。在这种情况下，为了满足消费者的审美和心理需求，广告开始从单一无趣的文体向更灵活、更有吸引力的模式转变。幽默广告随之繁荣起来了。幽默研究起源于亚理士多德时代，吸引着多个领域的学者们的注意。20世纪五十年代以来，幽默的应用研究开始纷纷崭露头角，口头交际中的幽默言语，名著作品中幽默文本，幽默电影的字幕翻译等逐渐成为幽默应用研究对象。本篇论文选择从违背合作原则的视角浅析中文广告中的幽默现象。一方面，文章中所得出的结论可以帮助消费者理解幽默广告的言外之意，避免消费者被一些欺骗性的广告哄骗，去买一些质量差的产品。另一方面，也为广告设计者设计优秀广告增添了更宽广的途径。

关键词：广告;幽默;合作原则

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 2

3. Brief Introduction of Advertising 3

3.1 Definition of advertising 3

3.2 Classification of advertising 4

4. Humor and Humor Theory 4

4.1 Definition of humor 5

4.2 General review of humor 5

5. The Theory of the Cooperative Principle 7

5.1 Notion of the CP 7

5.2 Specifications of the CP 7

5.3 Flouting of the CP 8

6. Realization of Humor in Chinese Advertising by Flouting the CP 9

6.1 Flouting the Maxim of Quantity 10

6.2 Flouting the Maxim of Quality 11

6.3 Flouting the Maxim of Relation 12

6.4 Flouting the Maxim of Manner 13

7. Conclusion 14

Works Cited 16

1. Introduction

Thanks to the development of science and media, advertising has taken an increasingly important place in our daily life. As we all know, advertising, a special kind of bridge, connects merchants with consumers. Or it may be regarded as a one-way communication, which means that consumers received the information that advertisers want to convey without the process of exchanging messages. As a result, advertising needs to be more interesting and attractive so that people can be persuaded to purchase the products. As a result, humorous advertising attracts people’s attention.

How do we define humorous advertising? Humorous advertising is a more interesting format of advertising. It employs humorous conversations or scenes to make people laugh for the purpose of leaving a deep impression on the public and stimulating their desire for purchasing.

Due to humorous advertising’s popularity, many researchers show their great interest in it. The researches cover many academic fields such as business, psychology, sociology and linguistics. Apart from this, many researchers even study it from the interdisciplinary perspective. At present, the studies on humor focus on the verbal material by means of employing Cooperation Principles and Relevance Theory. This thesis is intended to analyze the humor in Chinese advertisements from the perspective of violating the Cooperative Principle. Hopefully, it may be helpful through the process of designing and understanding of the humor in advertising.

The whole paper is made up of seven sections, and it proceeds in the following ways: Section 1 gives a brief introduction to the thesis topic. Section 2 focuses on previous study on advertising. In Section 3, a brief analysis of advertising is offered: firstly, discussing the definition of advertising, and secondly, exploring the classification of advertising. The definition and general review of humor are given in Section 4. Section 5 is devoted to the Cooperative Principle, including the notion of the CP, specifications of the Cooperative Principle, and violating the CP. Section 6 is the most important part of the thesis, which, with the help of some particular examples, makes a detailed study of the humor in Chinese advertisements in the light of the violation of the four maxims of the CP theory. The author draws a conclusion of the study in the last part.

2. Literature Review

As we all know, advertising rooted in the seventeenth century and became very popular quickly from the very beginning. Due to its unique function, a lots of researchers show great interest in it. Advertising has been studied from many aspects, such as economics, psychology, sociology, etc.

In English in Advertising (1986), Leech describes English advertisements from the aspect of speech sounds, phoneme, grammar and vocabulary, and makes a thorough study of the characteristics and contexts of advertising language. However, Leech doesn’t explain why English advertising appears as what it is.

Barthes has given a semiotic study of advertising language. He holds a belief that information can be conveyed to readers by double systems of codes-the linguistic text and the picture in a simple ad. He believes that these codes will work simultaneously and produce connotations in different processes. But both the linguistic message and the iconic one can’t avoid ambiguity because the explanation of the connotation of codes depends on the viewers’ cultural knowledge.

Geis also investigates into this problem from a linguistic point of view in his work The Language of Television Advertising. It seems that pragmatics is the point of his study.“The communication doesn’t occur successfully until the audiences gain the speaaker’s real meaning of the utterance instead of the linguistic meaning of it. Therefore, the aspect of pragmatics must be employed when talking about the effectiveness of communication.”(Sperber 86). However, he attaches great importance to the ill effects of advertising.

Although many Chinese scholars, such as Huang Guowen and Li Yuee, also have studied on advertisements from different aspects, but the study of Chinese advertising is comparatively scarce. Furthermore, from the above review, it’s not hard to see that people pay much attention to implicatures in advertising language instead of humor phenomenon in advertising. In addition, even though some scholars have showed their interest in humor in Chinese adverting, they scarcely probed into it from the angle of pragmatics. So here the author focuses on humor in Chinese advertising from the perspective of the violation of the Cooperative Principle.

3. Brief Introduction of Advertising

Nowadays, there is no doubt that advertisement exerts a great influence on our society and economy in our modern life. Similarly, advertising has taken an essential place in the development of our society and economy. In order to have a better understanding of advertising, this section is intended to give a brief introduction of ads. Firstly, it is to define the advertising and describe the main elements of advertisements. Then the author makes a brief analysis of the classifications of advertisements.

3.1 Definition of advertising

The English word, “advertise”, has originated from the Latin item “advertere” which means to attract the public’s attention to something and lead them to think of a certain destination. Nowadays, scholars from all around the world study the interpretation of advertising from various perspectives, but their definitions focus on something similar. Today, the widely adopted definition has been put forward by American Marketing Association:” Advertising is the nonpersonal communication of information usually paid for and usually persuasive in nature about products, service or ideas by identified sponsors through the various media” (Wang Junyuan 25).

Of course, there are also many other definitions proposed by other communities or persons. For example, according to American Association of Advertising Agencies, advertising is a paid format of borrowing from mass communication, with the purpose of supplying information, changing the attitudes to advertised products, triggering others to take action and win the profits for advertisement in the end. Concise Encyclopedia Britannica defines advertising as a way of conveying information with a purpose of promoting products and labor service, influencing public opinions and winning political supports to push forward a kind of business as well. Apart from this, in terms of our Chinese Cihai, advertising is usually used to introduce products to the public and broadcast service content, television entertainment and so on.

3.2 Classification of advertising

Advertising can be classified in different ways, either according to its purpose, medium, target audience, or geographic area. Commercial and non-commercial advertising are two types of advertising with the regard to different purposes. They different from each other because commercial ads aims at promoting sales and making money while the other not. In terms of its media, advertising is frequently transmitted through channels that permit the message to reach vast audiences simultaneously. Print and broadcast are the usual formats of these channels. Newspapers, magazines, direct mails, packages and messages are considered as print media, while radio, television, cinema and web traditionally are regarded as broadcast media. In spite of the same aims, these two channels convey information to consumers in different ways. Advertising falls into three main categories: business advertising, consumer advertising, and service advertising on the basis of various target audience. According to different geographic area, there are three types: international ads, national ads, and regional ads.

4. Humor and Humor Theory

When it comes to humor, without hesitation, some people think of joke; others are reminded of something that make us laugh. For all of us, humor not only creates a relaxing and comfortable atmosphere in our daily life, but also exists as an art form in many fields with measurable success. Because humor is so vital in our daily life, we may be confused about the definition of humor. In addition, we may seek some scholars’ study on humor. In this section, the author talks about humor.

4.1 Definition of humor

In the website of Wikipedia, we can find a general definition: humor or humor (see spelling differences) is the tendency of particular cognitive experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. The word “humor” originated from the medicine in ancient Greeks. People at that time believed that the humoral medicine was essential to our body because it could maintain the proportion of fluids.

Of course, the definition of humor is various because different scholars focus on different elements. Plato holds the view that humor is derived from ignorance in the weak, who are thus unable to retaliate when ridiculed. Aristotle, a famous philosopher in ancient Greeks, thinks that an ugliness that is not sick is the prereqiusite for humor. What’s more, humor is an attribute indispensable to man’s welfare. Indeed it is a temperament, a spirit, an attitude to life, and even a way of life. It is personality, an artistic style and aesthetic form (Xu Lixin 91). It is a tone, a mind style, and a category of discourse; it is a style of writing, which can exhibit itself under any topic as long as the humorist is in tune with the mood (Lin Yutang 90). It is also a writing, speaking or behaving technique for eliciting laughter (Xu Lixin 99).

4.2 General review of humor

Humor is an ancient and complicated research subject and a lot of scholars want to explain it from different theories. Until now, there are about more than two hundreds theories, but only three of them are widely accepted by the public, which are the Superiority Theory, the Incongruity Theory and the Relief Theory. In the hope of having a brief understanding of these three basic theories, the following part will give a simple introduction.

4.2.1 Superiority Theory

Superiority theory is the most popular theory of humor for centuries, which believes that the most vital element of humor is the superiority we have beyond those who are thought to be stupid, ugly, foolish and incompetent. It is obvious that Hobbes is the first person who put forward Superiority Theory. He thinks when someone feels proud, laughter appears. Of course, Henri Bergson is the person we must mention when it comes to Superiority Theory. Generally speaking, three views can be summarized as follows. First, humor is peculiar to mankind. Next, emotions don’t have the effect on humor. Last but not least, humor belongs to the public rather than the society or an individual. As a result, cultural background must be taken into consideration in the study of humor.

4.2.2 Relief Theory

Compared with Superiority Theory, the impact of Relief Theory is weaker, but there are still many scholars supposing this theory from different aspects. At the end of 19 centuries, philosopher Dewey has ever mentioned that laughter produces when suspense or expectation ends after lasting for a period.

Kline，who begins to study Relief Theory from the prospect of cognition，suggests that tension originates from all kinds of thinking activities. And people will have different feelings once they lose control over tension. One kind of feeling comes from bad or incorrect view, which leads to slight disappointment or tragedy, and the other is originated from the epiphany of joyfulness and happiness, which results in the production of humor.

4.2.3 Incongruity Theory

It is widely accepted by the public that Kant is the founder of Incongruity Theory. He claims that people will laugh when expectation suddenly disappears, which means that humor originates from disappearance of tense. It seems that Kent emphasizes the effect of accident, and Schopenhauer also supports it. However, whether their views are correct has not been determined.

Koestler, the funder of modern Incongruity Theory, proposes a concept “bisociation” on the basis of summarizing Superiority Theory and Relief Theory, trying to establish a comprehensive and universal humor theory. From his point of view, people’ emotion is more persistent. As a result, laughter is produced when thinking and emotion do not correspond with each other.

5. The theory of the Cooperative Principle

Pragmatic study aims at explaining how language is used to influence successful communication and many scholars have pay much attention to conversation, which is the most common form of communication. Among various aspects of studying conversation, the Cooperative Principle, abbreviated as CP, is one of the most important theories to explain the conversation. This part contains three main points: the notion of the CP, specification of the Cooperative Principle and violation of the CP.

5.1 Notion of the CP

Paul Grice, a famous philosopher and logician, is very interested in how conversation occurred, especially the way implied meanings are generated and understood. He suggests that communication must be limited because the subjects must follow some principles in order to make sure the achievement of the goals of communication.

Therefore, the Cooperative Principle was proposed. In his well-known lecture “William James Lecture” at Harvard in 1967, he first put forward the notion of the Cooperative Principle. And then, he claimed this principle in his article entitled “Logic and Conversation” that was published in 1975. He focuses on four maxims and each maxim has its own sub-maxims in the article. He believes that the communication among human beings always follow certain principles with the purposes of understanding each other and realizing effective communication.

5.2 Specifications of the CP

In Grice’s opinion, CP is the fundament of any communication to take place. To be more specific, he divided it into four detailed maxims under this general principle, which is borrowed from the German philosopher Immanual Kant’s four categories. The four maxims are as follows.

The Maxim of Quantity

(1) Make your contribution as informative as required (for the current purpose of the exchange).

(2) Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

The Maxim of Quality

1. Do not say what you believe to be false.
2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

The Maxim of Relation

Be relevant

The Maxim of Manner

1. Avoid obscurity of expression
2. Avoid ambiguity
3. Be brief ( avoid unnecessary prolixity)
4. Be orderly

(Grice, 26-27)

We can conclude from these maxims that in order to make conversation efficient, rational, cooperative, the subjects of communication should speak in a way of sincere, relevant and clear so that they provide sufficient information to each other.

From Grice’s perspective, whether speakers are ready to cooperate is the prerequisite for successful exchange of information. However, what seems interesting is that the subjects of communication always observe the CP, but they do not follow the maxims strictly.

5.3 Flouting of the CP

Sometimes, the maxim will be violated by speakers deliberately. For example, the speaker wants to mislead the hearer, so he may lie to the other one or provide inadequate amount of information, in which case, the other speaker can’t understand the one and the conversation can’t go on. Actually, Grice has mentioned some circumstances in which speakers fail to follow the maxims:

1. He may quietly and unostentatiously violate a maxim; if so, in some cases he will be liable to mislead.
2. He may opt out from the operation both of the maxim and of the CP; he may say, indicate, or follow it to become plain that he is willing to cooperate in the way the maxim requires. He may say, for example, I cannot say more; my lips are sealed.
3. He may be faced by a clash: he may be unable, for example, to fulfill the first maxim of Quantity (Be as informative as is required) without violating the second maxim of Quality (Have adequate evidence for what you say).
4. He may flout a maxim; that is, he may blatantly fail to fulfill it. On the assumption that the speaker is able to fulfill the maxim and to do so without violating another maxim (because of a clash), is not opting out, and is not, in view of the blatancy of his performance, trying to mislead, the hearer is faced with a minor problem: how can his saying what he did say be reconciled with the supposition that he is observing the overall Cooperative Principle? This situation is one that characteristically gives rise to a conversational implicature; and when a conversational implicature is generated in this way, I shall say that a maxim is being exploited

(Grice 30).

Although Grice holds a belief that the conversation must be carried out with the guidance of the theory of CP, sometimes we can achieve a special effect in the conversation by flouting the Cooperative Principle. In this case, the major importance will be attached to the flouting of the maxims of the CP when analyzing the humor in advertising.

6. Realization of Humor in Chinese Advertising by Flouting the CP

From the previous study, we can conclude that sometimes sticking to the Cooperative principle may not generate humorous effect in Chinese advertising. However, by flouting the CP, humor may be produced in advertising, which is of great help in achieving advertisers’ goal of stimulating the purchasing desire of potential consumers only using less attractive and persuasive language. This section mainly discusses the phenomenon that advertisers fail to observe the maxims of the CP and then humorous effects are produced in advertising. Several specific examples are chosen to explain how maxims are violated.

6.1 Flouting the Maxim of Quantity

The maxim of quantity means that the conversation needs to be as informative as is required in order to make the conversation succeed. Apart from this, do not give more information when communicating with others. Grice believes when a speaker offers more or less information than that the conversation requires, then flouting the maxim of quantity occurs. However, due to the high price of advertisements and the consumer’s short-term memory, advertiser would rather to use brief and simple expressions in the advertisements. As a result, most advertisements usually don’t provide consumers information directly instead of raising a question to put consumers into thought. Besides, there is another different ways of violating maxim of quantity---repeating the same thing for several times to leave the audience a deep impression.

Example 1:

谁说我不懂温柔？ （西凤酒广告）

Example 2:

达利蛋黄派，上班你也带？达利蛋黄派，你带我也带！达利蛋黄派，家家都喜爱！ （达利园蛋黄派广告）

The first advertisement is the good example of flouting of the first sub-maxim of the maxim of quantity while Example 2 best describes the way how an advertisement violates the second-maxim of the maxim of quantity. In example 1, the advertiser tries to promote a new kind of “Xi Feng” liquor without giving enough information. It uses a question “who says I don’t know how to be tender”, apparently unrelated to the liquor, to imply its different taste. This advertisement doesn’t tell consumers the brand directly, which flouts the first sub-maxim of the maxim of quantity (the conversation needs to be as informative as is required), but creates a laughable effect. Example 2 repeats the name of the product three times, violating the second sub-maxim of the maxim of quantity (Do not make your contribution more informative than is required). However, consumers can easily remember the brand and know the characteristics of “Da Liyuan” egg pie just because repetition is employed in this ad. It achieves its goal of promoting the product.

6.2 Flouting the Maxim of Quality

With the increasingly terrible competition, flouting the maxim of quality has been frequently used by advertisers in designing advertisements. However, we should be clear that flouting of the maxim of quality doesn’t mean that the advertisers intend to make any deceptive advertising. Instead, such rhetoric devices as pun and hyperbole are used to give rise to the violating of the sub-maxim of quality. In this part, the author discusses the flouting of two sub-maxims of quality (Do not say what you believe to be false and do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence) with the help of the following examples.

Example 3：

每天送你一位新“太太”。 （太太口服液）

Example 4：

香飘飘奶茶，一年卖出七亿多杯，连起来可以绕地球两圈。

(香飘飘奶茶)

Nowadays, the use of pun in Chinese advertisements becomes popular. The third case succeeds in employing pun to produce humor. It aims to introduce a kind of female health product “Taitai oral liquid”. The phrase “Taitai” includes two meanings, one of which is to mention the brand of the product. Meanwhile, the Chinese phrase “Taitai” is what we call a man’s wife. This advertisement implies that the product can make a woman become more beautiful day by day. The advertiser uses the rhetoric device of hyperbole both to create a humorous effect and to inform female consumers of the positive complexion changes the product can bring them.

Example 4 implies the flouting of the second sub-maxim of the maxim of quality. The producer of “Xiang Piaopiao” milk tea definitely doesn’t do a research about whether the bottles of the milk tea end to end can surround the Earth twice. But, consumers can remember its brand just because of hyperbole used in this humorous advertisement.

6.3 Flouting the Maxim of Relation

Generally speaking, it is impossible for advertisers to spend time talking anything unrelated to the products as the main task of advertising is to promote the products. But sometimes saying something apparently irrelevant to the product may run counter to advertisers’ desire and strengthen the impression of this product in consumers’ minds. Therefore, in some cases, some advertisements that don’t seem to be connected to the products will be put in use. Of course, several examples will be clearly analyzed in the rest of this part.

Example 5：

—包租婆，没水啦！

—用榄菊啊！

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