Due to the great progress of technology and escalation of various kinds of modern means of communication, cell phones have become the major facilities for people to talk and to have fun and content consumption has entered into the period of streaming media. As a consequence, online social media gradually becomes the effective way to promote sales. The prosperity of social media aiming at female customers brings up the hot sales of beauty products. The use of advertising copy writer to promote sales has become the key of running social media platforms. For instance, social media like Little Red Book makes use of the sharing copy writer of web celebrities along with the appealing photos and exaggerated words in the make-up product advertisement to increase the number of sales strongly. My thesis will concentrate on the content of hyperbole and its performance within the advertising copy writer in order to figure out its function of promoting sales.

There exists abundant studies of hyperbole inside and outside our country, most of them accomplish thorough research on hyperbole, discussing its definition and content together with the function it played on human psychology.

Currently these studies start from interdisciplinary angles which provides a new way of thinking. A lot of famous papers explore its features, origins and acceptance from multiple aspects like literature, aesthetics and psychology and put these into use in the interpretation of literature masterpieces.

Nowadays there are a lot of scholars manage to do logical and symbolized analysis using linguistic theories, such as computing the correspondence between the emotion value and threshold value of hyperbole. For example, the use of hyperbole in the advertising manages to create exaggerated image, making it possible for the audience to accept the speech event of the exaggerated image. Hyperbole is one kind of common rhetorical devices in language use, it exaggerates or minimizes the feature or the characteristic of one object and convey the intense feeling of the author, deepening people’s impression. The characteristic of it is “true or false is true”. The aim of advertisement is to arouse the audience’s attention and change them to potential customers of the product. In order to achieve this goal, the advertiser will use all the legal ways, enabling the audience to form the image about the product advertised. Combining the utilitarian ways like advertisement and rhetorical devices together will make huge profits, and thus becomes a critical method of advertising to write unique and attractive advertising copy writer.

The purpose and meaning of this thesis is to study the function of hyperbole within the context of language marketing. Considering that the females who are the most frequent users of online social media, and the fact that females often buy things impulsively, it is meaningful to see whether hyperbole can boost the sales of make-up products by the humorous and imaginary effects put into use in make-up advertisements. The technical method of achieving this goal need the help of spss, one kind of statistic tool. By counting the number of hyperbole and the page views, along with the sales number of each make-up product, it will be easy to know the role the hyperbole plays in the copy writer, therefore enables us to finish research of the relationship between hyperbole and the sales of make-up products.

2. 研究的基本内容与方案

The content and goal of the thesis aims to introduce the hyperbole and its pragmatic analysis, such as the constitution of hyperbole and its use in the make-up advertising copy writer. Hyperbole is not only an artistic rhetorical device, but also remains as one kind of figures of speech, mostly composed by verbs, numerals, nouns and subjunctive mood. It mainly comes from the author’s emotional expression and the need of the object being described, conveying its meaning through the rich imagination and the way of exaggerating or minimizing things based on the reality. To reach the goal of impressing the audience, using hyperbole makes it possible to intensify feelings of the audience and deepen the image in their heads. Due to the fact that the users of social media which has make-up products advertisements are mostly females and the feature that females tend to buy things without second thoughts, such phenomenon lead to the use of hyperbole to make the advertisement more irrational, inducing users to slip into the muddy area of consumption. Hyperbole encourage females to buy make-up products for its humorous language and the imaginary images formed are so convincing and exhilarating that females tend to do impulse consumption, in this way, the sales of make-up product can be ensured.

Technical method: I plan to use spss as the tool to do data analyses. To find out the number of hyperbole in the text and to figure out the sales of the product, by accomplishing this process, the relation of the sales and the use of hyperbole will be clear.

Halliday, M.A.K, Language as Social Semiotic[M], London: Edward Arnold, 1978:144

Halliday,M.A.K,Explorations in the Functions of Language[M], London:Edward Arnold,1973:112

Brentano, F.Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint[M]. London:Routledge, 1993