A Rhetoric-Based Analysis of Chinese Public Slogans

Abstract

The slogan is a special means to spread languages. It employs brief and short words to inspire, appeal or stop people to perform things. In the long history of China, the public slogan once played a significant role under a given historical background. It can be counted as an important approach of propaganda, involving the areas of politics, economy, culture and society, in the modern and contemporary China. Chinese slogans have strong characteristics of the Chinese language. In nearly a decade relevant studies about the type, translation, rhetoric and language features of Chinese public slogans emerge in an endless stream. Unfortunately, most of such studies are performed by scholars in the Chinese linguistic circle; the research which is based on English rhetoric or related theories of stylistics is quite rare. Therefore, in this thesis the author will analyze the stylistic features of Chinese public slogans from the perspective of English semantic features. Through the collected 50 slogans, we can find: (a) syntactically, these slogans are composed of simple words and symmetrical sentences; (b) semantically, these slogans are easy to understand and vary in their language styles; (c) rhetorically, these slogans mainly employ figures of speech, such as parallelism, personification, antithesis, etc..