Sperber and Wilson’s analysis focus on the form of communication which they call ostensive-inferential communication. According to Sperber and Wilson, there are two models of communication: the code and the inferential model. Communication may involve these two models, but inference is most fundamental in the process of communication. In other words, a coding-decoding process is subservient to an inferential process. The two authors argue that communication is successful not when hearers recognize the linguistic meaning of the utterance, but when they infer the speaker’s, eaming from it.
In communication, the transfer and interpretation of language always take place in certain situation and are affected by the situation which is called context. Theses situation are the foundation for people’s social communication. The concept is forst employed by Malinowski. After him, may scholars such as Firth, Halliday, Chomsky etc., contributed a lot to the study of context. In verbal communication, what is of great use to utterance understanding is a series of assumption forming the hearer’s cognitive context. A context in this immediately, anecdotal memories, general cultural assumptions, beliefs about the mental state of the speaker, may all play a role in interpretation. Because of the features and functions of cognitive context, the importance of cognitive context to text can be noticed and the relationship between cognitive context and pragmatics is much clear. According to its outstanding position in pragmatics, cognitive context is called on to complement the literal meaning of a sentence. In line with the position outlined here, it would seem more appropriate to think of cognitive context as being part of interpretation of meaning. In other words, meaning is not an invariant; it is context-dependant. Once the terminal context is specified, what is conveyed by the utterances would be confirmed.
1.3 Importance of context
In communication, the transfer and interpretation of language always take place in certain situation and are affected by the situation which is called context.These situations are the foundation for people’s social communication. In verbal communication, what is of great use to utterance understanding is a series of assumption forming the hearer’s cognitive context. A context in this immediately, anecdotal memories, general cultural assumptions, beliefs about the mental state of
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the speaker, may all play a role in interpretation. Because of the features and functions of cognitive context, the importance of cognitive context and pragmatics is much clear. According to its outstanding position in pragmatics, cognitive context is called on to complement the literal meaning of a sentence. In line with the position outline here, it would seem more appropriate to think of cognitive context as being part of interpretation of meaning. In other words, meaning is not an invariant, it is context-dependant, Once the terminal context is specified, what is conveyed by the utterances would be confirmed.
Pun isn’t recognizable from the linguistic form alone. Its recognition depends on an interaction between the linguistic form of the advertisement, the shared cognitive information and the cognitive principle. For the consumer to understand an advertising pun, he has to first associate what he sees with the immediate context of the situation. This process of association yields some basic cognitive environments: the consumer perceives some properties embedded in and beyond the advertisements. Then he begins his second step, searching for proper interpretation. This stage can be characterized as a process of matching the basic cognitive environment with a shared world. The search for an interpretation is the search for relevant contextual assumptions.
Pun is highly context-dependent. Sperber and Wilson suggest that there are three main ways of accessing contextual assumptions :(a)from the interpretation of previous utterance;(b)from encyclopedic memory;(c)from the physical environment in which the utterance takes place. In a given situation, some assumptions will be more easily accessible than others, and will therefore require less processing effort. Some scholars are of the opinion that the use or understanding of puns may vary from person to person due to their different education levels. According to them, punning is connected with sophistication and wit.
However, the production and recognition of punning in advertising is not necessarily restricted to persons with higher education and not necessarily bound by national boundaries.
The characterization of relevance in terms of contextual effects and processing effort involves a reformulation of the very notion of context. Sperber and Wilson
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reject the idea of a context given to interlocutors beforehand, and opt for a more dynamic view of context as constructed during the conversation. Instead they propose a much more dynamic view of context as a construct that has to be established and developed in the course of interaction in order to select the correct interpretation:” a context is a psychological construct, a subset of the hearer’s assumptions about the world. Each new utterance, through drawing on the same grammar and the same inferential abilities as previous utterances, requires a rather different context”[7]The previous contextual features form the initial context that is the supporting element for the processing of new information and the creation of further contextual attributes. The assessment of relevance is not the goal of the comprehension process, but rather a means to the end of comprehension.
2 Introduction of pun
Discourse than what has been expected, whose studies have never been more complete. How it is adopted in advertising to facilitate the linguistic communication and ultimately serve to reach the intended purposes, and cognitively cast influences upon the advertiser’s expression and the audience’s interpretation of the utterances in discourse is still a wonder which is worth making an attempt to have a through understanding.
Punning is one of the rhetorical deveces used very often in the English language. Over a long period of time, especially over the past 20 of puns. In professor Wen Jun’s Adictionary of English Figures of Speech, puns are fall into five categories and provide some methods in advertisements [2].
What we see in an advertising considerably helps shape our expectation about what it will communicate as well as our strategies for interpretation. In advertising, there can be little doubt that the primary intention behind an advertisement is to make people buy. Consterdine, for instance, describes advertising as a means of informing customers about products and services and persuading them to buy [5]”. Similarly, Pateman points out that “the point or purpose with which any individual advertisement is produced, is of course, to sell products [6]”. The fact that advertising in the last resort always aims to sell a product has another important consequence: it is
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that any evaluation of the commodity which the message might contain will always be positive.
A pun can be defined as “a use of words that have more than one meaning, or words that have the same pronunciation but different meanings, so what you say has two different meanings and makes people laugh.” Generally speaking, there are two kinds of puns. One is called homonyms, and the other homophones. The former means that a word has several meanings, whereas the latter means that several words sound the same. Both homophones and homonyms can be phrases rather than single words.
2.1 Classification of pun
Pun falls into five categories, namely homophonic pun, paronomasia, antalaclasis, sylletic pun, asteismus.
Homophonic pun refer to an amusing use of words with the same pronunciation, but different spellings. In modern English, there are exist a large number of words that happened to share the same pronunciation with different meanings. Paronomasia is to use two or more words, which sound similar or nearly the same and make double senses, to form a pun. Antalaclasis refers to those puns that have one word used teice or more times yet have different meanings for each time. Sylleptic pun is similat to antalaclasis, but the word used as a pun occurs only once with two or more different meanings, In sylleptic puns, more information is conveyed with fewer words. This kind of pun of astesmus is based on the ambiguity of the same word or expression. It’s usually used in a dialogue. 2.1.1 Homonym
As Greig points out that “all plays on words, good or bad, depend for their effort on the conjunction of similar sound with different meanings, and require us to attend to both sound and meaning”[7]. Both homonyms and homophones in words can be used to create puns, but they have different natures. Polysemy refers to one word that has different explanations which are semantically related with each other. For example, the word “govern” can mean “to rule” or “to control or determine”. Whereas， homonymous words are different word items with the same phonetic form and spelling. They not only differ in meanings, but also are unrelated[8]. Let us see the
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word“prop”. When it is used as a noun, it can mean “a support place to hold up something heavy or “any small article that is used on the stage in the acting of a play.
Eg.1 then there was the man in the restaurant. “You are not eating your fish,” the waitress said to him. “Anything wrong with it?” “Long time to sea,” the man replied.
“Long time to sea” is a common expression between friends who have not met for a long time. The reply “Long time to sea”, is the man’s ironic way to express his complaint. It implies the fish was stale, for it had been out of the sea too long. The words “see” and “sea” are homophones. The same pronunciation /si:/ forms the homophonic pun. 2.1.2 Asteismus
Cuddon believes that there is a kind of pun named “Asteismus”, that is, the latter utterance is corresponding to the former one, but the correspondence diverts to the original meaning[9]. When referring to language itself, puns usually have more than two meanings. Speaking, “Asteismus” is distinguished from “ambiguity” in nature. “Ambiguity” is a natural limitation of language, which has nothing to do with the pragmatic intention. People’s speech acts should try to avoid ambiguity to ensure communication to proceed smoothly. On the other hand, asteismus puns are a kind oflanguage art that people pursue on purpose and are creative. In other words, asteismus puns rhetorically exploit ambiguity; and puns are the final goal, not the means. Asteismus puns have two embodiments: ellipsis and expansion.
Eg. Next to myself，1likeVedonis.
Vedonis is a brand name, and “next to” can be interpreted either physically or more abstractly. If the audience takes the more abstract interpretation, she will recover “after myself, I like Vedonis underwear.” But the audience will think that it is strange to say this about underwear, for it is more common to say such a thing about one’s mother, husband or child. Considering that it is an advertisement for underwear, which one wears next to one’s skin, the audience will find a physical interpretation also possible.
2.1.3 Pun-metaphor
Pun-metaphor is by no means the same with pure metaphor in that the former one involves at least two subjects while the latter involves only one [9]. For example,
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