Globalization has boosted economic development of the whole world and promoted communication among different cultures at the same time. As the main vehicle of cultural diffusion, media helps people have a better knowledge of what happening in the world. As different media develop, advertising can be seen everywhere in our daily life, whether watching TV at home or driving on the highway. To some degree, advertising changes our life. It not only brings a huge number of advertisements from other countries, but also helps citizens to learn more about different cultures. In regard to advertising, the language of advertising is always necessary. People can see or hear it from newspapers, magazines, radio, television and the Internet. Actually, languages are symbolic systems, which are the most effective and precise. In the world of languages, each word used in communication is a symbol and has its own meanings. Advertising language is generally applied by advertising agencies to present their ideas, products, consumption concepts and fashionable pursuits of the market. Whether it is commercial or non-commercial, advertising renders the world connecting closely. However, commercial and non-commercial advertising has different objectives. For commercial advertising, operators of promotional items and service providers bear the costs of selling goods and services directly or indirectly by means of certain media and forms, while non-commercial advertising aims to evoke attention to focus on fixing some social problems. Commercial and non-commercial advertising will be probed into according to the context theory in this paper. Many scholars have done many researches on advertising language from different perspectives, such as the perspectives of lexical semantics, syntax, and applied psychology. However, few carry out studies from the perspective of the context theory. In fact, context theory can helped understand advertising comprehensively after learning the historical background, social environment and the cultural tradition. The paper will adopt the non-linguistic context to analyze advertising language.

Ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign scholars have studied the context theory. In foreign countries, Malinowski was the first to put forward the context theory; then J.R.Firth (51) developed the theory, and built the systemic functional school; Halliday (76) established the register theory and Hymes (53-62) presented the SPEAKING formula. Each alphabet means elements of context: S=Setting, P=participants, E=End, A=Act sequence, K=Key, I=Instrumentalities, N=Norms of interaction and interpretation, G=Genre. In China, Wang Dechun (64) divided the context into subject and object; Chen Wangdao (48) used language factors and situational factors to classify the context. He Zhaoxiong (315) classified it into context knowledge and extra linguistic knowledge; following the view of Halliday, Hu zhuanglin (402-409) proposed the linguistic context, situational context and cultural context, and so on. To sum up, context can be divided into linguistic context and non-linguistic context and this paper is based on this fundamental classification.

The aim of this paper is to use the distinctive linguistic theory in daily life, and get a better understanding of American values. This paper consists of four chapters. Chapter One introduces the research background, research significance and the aim of the research. Chapter Two is the theoretical foundations, encompassing the language and culture, context theory, features of advertising language and interactions between advertising language and culture. Chapter Three will employ the context theory to analyze commercial advertising and non-commercial advertising. Moreover, true American culture could be perceived from the language of advertising. Chapter Four is the conclusion of the whole paper, major findings of the research and suggestions for further researches.