| As an effective means to convey commercial information, advertisement has great impact on people’s daily life in modern society. Cosmetic advertisement has been the beloved one among all types of advertisement since people are beauty-loving in nature. All possible means, linguistic or non-linguistic, have been adopted by the cosmetic advertisers to achieve the dual purposes of informing the potential consumers of the advertised products and persuading them to take the action of purchase. Pragmatic presupposition is such an effective linguistic device to transmit the implied information in a veiled and indirect way that is frequently employed by cosmetic advertisers to enhance the persuasive function of the advertising language. Therefore, it is significant to explore the working mechanism of pragmatic presupposition in constructing and interpreting modern cosmetic advertising discourse.The source of data is from English magazine Vanity Fair in 2014 and 2015. The author analyzes 63 pieces of cosmetic advertisement. The analysis is an integration of a quantitative study and a qualitative study, with the qualitative one being the main approach. The studies of the application of pragmatic presupposition, presupposition triggers and the functions achieved belong to qualitative analysis while the statistical studies of distribution and frequency of pragmatic presupposition and presupposition triggers are conducted under quantitative analysis.The major finding is that pragmatic presupposition is frequently employed in cosmetic advertisement, with the existential presupposition accounting for the top rank (71.4%). As for the presupposition triggers, definite descriptions occupy the largest percentage (42.9%). What’s more, the functions of pragmatic presupposition will be illustrated respectively in terms of linguistic aspect and pragmatic aspect.To sum up, pragmatic presupposition is helpful to design cosmetic advertising language and fulfill the advertisers’communicative purposes. The author interprets the expressiveness of the advertisers and receptiveness of the consumers so as to obtain insightful and comprehensive viewpoints of the application of pragmatic presupposition in cosmetic advertisement. It is hoped that this thesis can help readers to get familiar with the concept and classification of pragmatic presupposition and to have a general understanding of how pragmatic presupposition conveys the presupposed information to maximize the contextual effects of the cosmetic advertisement. |
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