Abstract:It is widely acknowledged that advertisements can be served as an effective tool to communicate and convey information. Recent years, the study on advertisement has attracted wide attention among linguists and experts. According to the linguists, advertisements haven’t expressed the information to the audience directly. Instead, puns are widely used in advertisement to indirectly express information to the audience. Thus, it is necessary and important to study and analyze the puns in English advertisement. Advertisement is to be the main form of communication to transmit all kinds of information, and Relevance Theory is to be an inferential theory of communication, and that the theory is put forward to account for how the audience makes an inference of the intended meaning of the advertiser. Therefore, based on Relevance Theory by Sperber and Wilson, the author attempts to study puns including definition, characteristic, function and classification. The paper is supposed to achieve the following three goals. Firstly, it can help advertisers have a good attempt of the puns in advertisements. Secondly, the audience can exactly gain the intention of the advertiser in the best cognitive context. Thirdly, the advertisers can make use of the puns in English advertisement.  

Key Words: English advertisement; Relevance theory; Ostension; Context

摘要：众所周知，广告作为一种有效的沟通和传递信息的工具。在近几年来,广告研究已经在语言学家和专家当中引起了广泛的关注。据语言学家所知，广告不能直接地对观众表达信息，相反的，在广告中运用双关语可以间接地向观众表达信息。因此很有必要研究并分析英语广告中的双关语。广告主要以交际形式传递各种信息，关联理论作为一种交际推理理论，并提出观众如何推理广告主的意图的解释。

因此，根据斯宾塞和威尔森的关联理论， 作者将尝试去研究双关语，其中包括其定义、特征、功能以及分类。从本文中可以得出以下三个目的。第一，有助于广告主在广告中有一个好的尝试。第二，观众能够在最佳认知领域中准确获得广告主的意图。第三，有助于广告主充分利用英语广告中的双关语。

关键词：英语广告; 关联理论；明示；语境

注：本文全文为英语所写的英语论文。只有摘要是中英语写的，全文为英文。