摘 要

随着整个移动时代的进步和技术的升级,流量越来越便宜,手机越来越智能,内容消费已跨入流媒体时代。新型社交媒体不断出现,取代、淘汰旧媒体。企业对接社交新媒体的速度与频率加快了。未来,快速掌握并布局新媒体,这或许会成为品牌企业生死时速间的救命稻草。社交平台所带来的流量可变现成数量惊人的现金流，这对于许多商品以及品牌都构成了巨大的吸引力。小红书等分享型社交平台的盛行带动了各类产品的畅销，尤其是美妆类产品。根据对于女性购物心理的深入分析，商家使用赏心悦目的图片连同撩拨人心的夸张语言做成营销文案，十分有力地带动了产品销量。夸张辞格的运用是文案行之有效的重要因素。本论文将从夸张辞格的定义和组成开始，再延伸到认知心理学的理论，来研究夸张辞格的内容和其在营销文案中的作用，探求语言对于促进销售的作用。

关键词：夸张修辞；社交平台；化妆品；营销文案；认知心理学

Abstract

Due to the great progress of technology and escalation of various kinds of modern means of communication, cell phones have become the major facilities for people to talk and to have fun and content consumption has entered into the period of streaming media. As a consequence, online social media gradually becomes the effective way to promote sales. The prosperity of social media aiming at female customers brings up the hot sales of cosmetic products, the copy writer to promote sales has become the key of social media. Hyperbole is not only an artistic rhetorical device, but also remains as one kind of figures of speech that mainly comes from the author’s emotional expression and the need of the object being described, conveying its meaning through the rich imagination and aroused feelings, and the way of exaggerating or minimizing things based on the reality. This paper consists of four parts. The first part deals with the introduction and literature review of hyperbole, the second part is the discussion of psychologic mechanism and the effects of hyperbole including the characteristics and formations of hyperbole. The third part focuses on the case study of hyperbole language in copy writers on social media. The last part is composed of the questionnaire of the use of hyperbole in copywriters online.. trying to analyze how the hyperbole is conveyed and accepted from the psychology angle. The main purpose of this thesis is to know the relationship between hyperbole rhetoric and the sales of the product, thus reach the conclusion that what kind of effect on sales would the hyperbole language achieves.

Key Words: hyperbole, copywriter, social media, make-up product marketing, cognitive psychology

Contents

1.Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………..1

2.Literature Review…………………………………………………………………………….2

2.1 The definition of hyperbole…………………………………………………………… 2

2.2 The categories of hyperbole………. ………………………………………………….3

2.3 The effects of hyperbole

2.3.1 The psychological mechanism of hyperbole………………………………………4

2.3.2 The pragmatic effects of hyperbole.………………………………..……….7

3.Research questionnaire………………………………………………………..8

3.1The basic information of the respondents…………………………………8

3.2The questions and results……………………………………….…………8

3.3The comparison of hyperbole language and other ways of advertising….12

4. Case study of the language used in the copy writers………………………...12

5.Conclusions…………………………………………………………………..15

References……………………………………………………………………...16

Acknowledgements………………………………………………………….…17

The use of Hyperbole in Cosmetic

Product Marketing on social media

1 Introduction

Due to the prevailing of interconnection network, and the convenience of online resources, the online platforms have become one of the major ways for people to make purchases. Youngsters tend to refer to others’ opinions when they are about to buy things. As a consequence, the bloggers would have a say among them. Thus, the cosmetic marketing copy writer is the crucial factor which sway people’s decisions.

In order to know about the function of hyperbole in copy writer, a central issue in this thesis is to do research in hyperbole language in the copy writers. There have been several investigations focusing on the definition of hyperbole and the pragmatic uses in various kinds of contexts, changing from the trend of empirical studies to rational studies, along with the interdisciplinary perspectives such as the psychologic, aesthetic and literature angles. However, the function of hyperbole in the writing of online copywriters has been underestimated. Therefore, the research upon the relationship of these two should be carried out. Applying the hyperbole rhetoric into these contexts will add luster to the article, thus to reach the goal of research. This paper will focus on the corpus of make-up products copywriter on social media, putting the past research of hyperbole into use, along with cognitive psychology theories to find out the function of which in the writing of copywriter and accomplish questionnaire analysis by exploiting the data obtained from respondents to know the relationship between the hyperbole language and the sales of make-up product.

2 Literature Review

2.1 The definition of hyperbole

The word “hyperbole” means an excess of emotion. According to the dictionary, hyperbole is a figure of speech which gently exaggerates the truth, it expresses the stronger emotion of people in order to gain some certain kinds of rhetorical effects. Hyperbole can also be called as one kind of overstatement.

In “The Origin of Rhetoric” , Mr. Chen Wangdao put forward that hyperbole has remained as one of the artistic ploy as well as one kind of rhetorical , the research of which has a long history in the literature and artistic fields in our country. Among the 575 research results of hyperbole on the website China National Knowledge Infrastructure, there are for about four fifths of these researches hyperbole and other fields of study. A lot of them exploit the characteristic of hyperbole that as a matter of fact remains to be one kind of cognitive rhetoric. According to the fact that was mentioned by Chen Wangdao that hyperbole is a psychologic activity which represents free emotional expression. Realizing that hyperbole actually bases on psychology ground, which facilitates the formation of hyperbole rhetoric and was constrained by a certain kind of psychology mechanism that a big number of advertisers put hyperbole into use to attain psychologic connections with readers. Researchers of the past few decades strived to find out the relationship between hyperbole and their fields of study, making researches to become interdisciplinary study.

It was mentioned in “ The Comments of Researches of Hyperbole”, Zeng Min mentioned that due to the feature that the hyperbole rhetoric being the applicable way of writing, most of the studies did the research from the linguistic pragmatic point of view, regarding the hyperbole rhetoric as one of the ways of reaching different kinds of goals. In ancient times, the use of hyperbole had been frequent in all kinds of literature work, to convey the exaggerated description of images. Later on, the hyperbole researches had focused on the interdisciplinary fields with the combining of hyperbole rhetoric and interdisciplinary field work. According to Zeng Min, there exists lots of researches which take advantage of the human cognitive feature and to arouse the intense feelings of people, some of them exploited the quantitive analysis to find out the functional relationship of these two.

2.2 The categories of hyperbole

Hyperbole can be divided into overstatement, understatement and premature hyperbole. Overstatement means to exaggerate the truth, meaning to highlight the objects’ features. It is also known as positive hyperbole. According to this feature, overstatement has two categories. It can be listed out as direct hyperbole and indirect hyperbole based on its expressive form. The direct hyperbole means to exaggerate or minimize the real image using artistic way like intensifying emotions or exaggerating the images to show fun, sympathy, anger or disgust. For example, the incitation from Jane Austen : ”Don’t keep coughing so, kitty, for heaven’s sake! Have a little compassion on my nerves. You tear them to pieces.” is one of direct hyperbole example. Such exaggeration bases on the basic feature of things and takes advantage of the ample imagination to make the artistic hyperbole stand out, with the accompany of emotion expression rather than the description of truth, which makes it quite sensible. Direct hyperbole emphasizes the feature of image and set the mood, which inspires readers’ imagination and thus form the profound image within their heads. On the other hand, the indirect hyperbole which achieves the humorous or sarcastic hyperbole effect with the help of metaphor, analogy , comparison etc. Just like the incitation that “My brain was as powerful as a dynamo, as precise as a chemist’s scales, as penetrating s a scalpel.” Comparing his brain with the dynamo and describe his precision with the chemist’s scales, the author brags about his ability with the help of these rhetorical ways, creating a concrete and visual image. This bases on the fact and uses other rhetorical ways to reveal the object’s nature in a better way and enables the language to become vivid.

Understatement is to minimize the truth, to use the restrained diction to understate the declarative things, also known as negative hyperbole. Shakespeare said that:” And then the whining schoolboy with his satchel