A Linguistic Analysis Of Fuzziness In Advertising English

After its WTO entry, China is more and more integrated with the world economy and the rapid development of globalization. Competitions in business are becoming more fierce and compelling. Advertising, with its increasingly important role in today's business world, can be a very effective vehicle, when well employed, for domestic companies to promote their sales and to build their images in the international market. Against the background that advertising in China to some extent remains lagging behind the west in both physical attraction and persuasiveness, thorough and theoretical studies on successful western advertising are urgently needed to help improve both the understanding and designing of successful advertisements.After an brief introduction to advertising, advertising language, fuzziness and fuzzy linguistics, the thesis elaborates on the linguistic realization of fuzziness in advertising English from the following two perspectives: firstly, the semantic realization. In the semantic analysis, hedges, non-numerical fuzzy quantifiers, frequency words, descriptive words, comparatives and superlatives, the pronouns used without antecedent referents and indefinite pronouns, and lastly, the symbols and abbreviations are analyzed to reveal their fuzzy nature that are used by advertisers to achieve their persuasive ends. Secondly, the syntactical realization. Syntactically speaking, fuzziness is reflected in sentences with ellipsis and word order variations and disjunctive sentences to achieve a "strangeness" effect so as to attract consumers. To further explore the application of fuzziness in advertising language, in the following part a pragmatic research is conducted to see whether application of fuzziness duly observes the Cooperative Principle and the Politeness Principle and how it functions in advertising communication. It can be concluded from the pragmatic study that fuzzy language in advertisements violate certain maxims of the Cooperative Principle and observes certain maxims of the Politeness Principle to achieve effectiveness in their persuasion. The pragmatic functions of fuzzy language is also numerous, as it can make the advertisements emphatic and enhance the efficiency, flexibility and vividness of the advertisements. The thesis concludes with a brief summary of the study in which the limitations and implications of the study will be pointed out to make the paper complete. Further studies on this subject or in related areas are also suggested.University of International Business and EconomicsSchool of English...