Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
Ads, with a long history, affect our life for decades. Nowadays, as the globaleconomy develops, various media as the carrier of ads, are used to satisfy ourincreasing material needs. Commercial advertisers often seek to generate increasedconsumption of their products or services through “branding”, which involvesassociating a product name or image with certain qualities in consumers’ mind. Inorder to catch consumers’ attention and promote sales, all merchants and producerstransfer their efforts to advertisements. Therefore, after World WarⅡ, economyrecovered and advertisements became popular in commerce. According to statisticfigures applied by studies, each consumer in America contacts up to more than 1600advertisements a day via various approaches (Barry, 1973). Its primary function is to get across key selling points to desired prospects in a manner that attracts attentionand stimulates them to give serious consideration to the product (Wells, Burnett andMoriarty, 1992). Due to the function of advertisements, the content of ads has longbeen considered as the most important part of an advertisement (Ogilvy, 1983).In order to achieve persuasive function and appeal to more audience, variousrhetorical devices as the foregrounding approaches are employed in advertising. Theseforegrounding approaches, as an irregular style arouse scholars’ attention and arestudied by them. However, for a long time, the study of advertising language onlylimited in the sphere of language characterization and language rhetoric. Since 20thcentury, as cognitive linguistics develops, stylistics has both replaced and expandedon the earlier study of the domain of classical rhetoric. This thesis is a link ofcognitive linguistics and classical rhetoric, i.e. using the figure-ground theory ofcognitive linguistics to interpret foregrounding approaches in advertisements. Thisstudy changes the route of classical study of style and continues the line of cognitivelinguistics and concerns with cognitive aspects of information processing which isforegrounding in advertising language.
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1.2 Significance of the Study
As advertising develops, gradually, designers of advertisements pay growingattention on the adverting language. Lots of foregrounding means are applied inadvertisements, some of which even become the catchwords in social community. Since the time of Aristotle, scholars and researchers began to observe, ponder andanalyze theses language phenomena. However, most of these studies still just payattention to style characteristics itself. With the development of cognitive linguistics,although some studies connect style with cognition, only one aspect of foregroundingor two has been mentioned. This thesis avoids this shortage and tries to cover most offoregrounding approaches of advertising language with the sphere of cognitive frame.This study analyzes these approaches from perspective of figure-ground theoryto interpret the realization of foregrounding. In light of figure-ground theory, thisstudy is devoted to making an analysis of foregrounding from the cognitiveperspective with the aim to find out the identification of figure and ground inforegrounding approaches at the rhyme, lexical, syntactic, semantic levels, withrhetoric meaning of these foregrounding functions as the ground and the in，英语论文题目，英语论文
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