A Study Of Pragmatic Presupposition On Beverage Egnlish Advertising Slogans

Advertisements have become an essential part of the economic world because they promote the commodities, and they are an inescapable phenomenon in our daily life because of their influence on us while purchasing products. As competition in advertising market is fierce and the cost is high, the consistent advertising slogans are made to represent their commodities. Advertising slogans are usually concise,interesting and easy to remember, in the hope of inducing the potential customers to take actions to buy the advertised products. Presupposition is frequently employed in advertising slogans because it can convey hidden information about the products. Many scholars have studied presupposition from semantic and pragmatic perspectives. However, few studies are about advertising slogans, especially the beverage advertising slogans. With the development of economy, communication and activities between different countries are becoming more and more frequently.Therefore, people are exposed to English advertisements more easily, and presupposition theory is widely used in the booming advertising slogans.Based on this background, the author finds it necessary to analyze the presuppositions in beverage English advertising slogans.This thesis focused on the familiar brands in our life, such as Coca Cola and Pepsi. The author has collected 215 advertising slogans from the English websites and analyzed them with combination of a quantitative study and a qualitative study. The author firstly described the linguistic features of the collected slogans based on the theory of presupposition trigger. The morphology, syntax and rhetoric features were described in this part. Then, the author classified the slogans according to the presuppositions employed in them. Based on Yule’s presupposition theory,presuppositions can be divided into six types, namely existential presupposition, factive presupposition, lexical presupposition, structural presupposition, non-factive presupposition, and counterfactual presupposition.The results reveal that the frequency of slogans containing presuppositions is high with the percentage of 96.7%. One slogan can have more than one presupposition. And, five types of presuppositions are found. The most dominant type of presupposition is the existential presupposition. The second one is the lexical presupposition, the third one is the factive presupposition, the fourth one is the structural presupposition and the fewest one is the counter-factual presupposition.No non-factive presupposition is used in the collected slogans. The use of presupposition in advertising slogans makes them concise and their commodities glorified. What’s more, the potential customers are persuaded to take actions to buy the products as well with the help of presupposition in slogans.Through analyzing the presupposition in advertising slogans, this thesis aims to help the customers understand the slogans better and make a rational choice when they are faced with various advertisements. It may also inspire the advertisers to design more scientific and persuasive slogans. In the end, the thesis can enrich the studies of advertising language in our country.