A Study Of The Pragmatic Functions Of Hedges In English Commercial Advertising Based On Relevance Theory

The research objectives of the present study are the pragmatic functions of hedges inEnglish commercial advertising and the cognitive mechanism behind them.Hedges are pervasive in everyday conversations. The fact that they also exist incommercial advertising, which is a strongly goal-oriented communicative activity,shows that hedges operate to serve a variety of pragmatic functions in making theadvertisements more persuasive. Some researches and studies on hedges inadvertising contexts have been done, but few of them have been carried out from acognitive perspective. Based on many previous studies, the present study takesSperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory as the theoretical framework and makes aqualitative study on a number of commercial advertisements that contain the use ofhedges.This study discovers that as a communicative strategy, hedges are madedeliberate use of by the addressor in the form of words, phrases, or structures etc. incommercial advertising to satisfy his/her communicative needs. Inrelevance-theoretical terms, in the formulation of a hedged advertisement, theadvertiser makes assumptions about the existing cognitive environment of theconsumers as well as their common ground and accordingly phrases and structures theadvertisement, so that it manipulates the cognitive context and guides the inference onthe part of the consumer. Hedge works as a signpost that signals the direction ofinterpretation that is intended by the advertiser. The thesis concludes that hedges havetwo kinds of pragmatic functions, one is to function as cognitive constraints and theother is to function as politeness strategies.The present study has been carried out in the hope to provide some guidance foradvertisers to better analyze and understand consumer perception mechanism so as tomake the advertisements more effective by the appropriate use of hedges.