한국언어과학회

In this paper, we show the characteristics of advertisements and suggest that the figurative languages in advertising can be explained by Relevance Theory in Sperber and Wilson(1986). As one crucial role of advertisement aims or a communicative act that an advertiser may expect to persuade a consumer to purchase a particular product by way of mass-media, advertising will be regarded as a discourse act (or context). Sperber and Wilson maintains that people generally aim to achieve the most efficient improvement to their general representation of the world with the least cost in processing information. Relevance Theory plays an essential role in explaining human communication and enables us to recognize(or understand) the way that humans successfully communicate. Thus, we examine figurative languages in advertisements and prove the consistency between them and Relevance Theory.