An Analysis Of Pragmatic Presupposition In English Commercial Advertisements

With the rapid development of economy, there are more and more various products or services entering into people’s lives. Wherever people are, they always see different kinds of advertisements. People can see various advertisements when they walk in the street, shop in the supermarkets, watch TV, read books and even listen to the radios. So advertising plays a vital role in people’s lives. In order to achieve the certain goals of their products or services, the advertisers have to adopt all possible means to make successful advertisements. How to make the advertisements more attractive and persuasive and how to persuade consumers to take purchase actions are the main topics of making advertisements. As the soul of the advertising, advertising language is closely related to the success of advertisements. The copywriters should attempt to make the advertising language more attractive and more persuasive by using some linguistic or non-linguistic strategies. Presupposition as the important phenomenon in pragmatics is frequently employed by the advertisers to design advertisements. Presupposition has special properties and characteristics; therefore, it is very critical to study the advertising language from the view of pragmatic presupposition.Although there are some researchers have researched the advertising language from different point of view, such as the words, phrases and the rhetoric; few works and papers paid attention to the advertising language from the point of pragmatic presupposition. In order to well know the pragmatic presupposition in the advertising language, the author does her best to explore the efficient mechanism of pragmatic presupposition by collecting different kinds of English commercial advertisements from some resources, such as online, magazines and newspapers which are quite famous in people’s lives. By studying the pragmatic presupposition in English commercial advertising, the author desires to give some theoretical guidance to the advertising writers to make more and more successful advertisements and achieve their commercial purposes.In this paper, the author uses the pragmatic presupposition as the basic theory. In order to theoretically study the pragmatic presupposition, the author adopts two methods, namely, qualitative and quantitative methods, and the qualitative method is the main one. The classifications, the characteristics and the functions of pragmatic presupposition in English commercial advertising belong to the qualitative study while the statistical analysis of the distribution and frequency of pragmatic presupposition in English commercial advertising belongs to the quantitative study.There are five types of pragmatic presuppositions in the English commercial advertising. According to the study, the result shows that the frequency of the existential presupposition in 96 advertisements is the highest(50%). The frequency of state presupposition is the second highest(19.79%). The third one is the factive presupposition(14.58%). Belief presupposition is the fourth highest(7.29%). The behavior presupposition and the unidentifiable presupposition is the same(4.17%). As a result, the pragmatic presupposition plays a very important role in the existential presupposition, state presupposition and factive presupposition. The high frequency of existential presupposition is almost in every kind of advertisements. The functions of pragmatic presupposition in English commercial advertising can be summed up in the following: pragmatic presupposition can make the English commercial advertising more concise; pragmatic presupposition can make the English commercial advertising more diverse; pragmatic presupposition can better organize the information of the advertising language; pragmatic presuppositions can add the humor to the English commercial advertising language; pragmatic presuppositions can make people get the deeper information of the English commercial advertising language; pragmatic presuppositions can highlight the focus of language information and pragmatic presuppositions can lead and conceal the information of the advertising language.It is concluded that pragmatic presupposition plays a vital role in the designing of English commercial advertisements. In this thesis, there are two implications, the theoretical implication and the practical implication. Theoretically, the author provides a detailed analysis of pragmatic presupposition in English commercial advertising. Many scholars pay much attention to the advertising language from the point of view of pragmatic presupposition in recent years. This paper studies the advertising language from the pragmatic perspective and contributes to the application of the theory of pragmatic presupposition. Practically, in order to achieve the goals of the advertising, the writers of the advertisements attempt to make the advertisements more attractive and persuasive. This paper offers some advice to the advertising copywriters leading them to make successful advertisements. The pragmatic presupposition plays an important role in the advertising language and the functions of the pragmatic presupposition is also vital in people’s daily communication. The advertisers will get a better understanding of how to adopt the pragmatic presupposition in making advertisements and how to make the advertising language more economical and make the language communication more efficient.