A Study Of Pragmatic Enrichment In English Commercial Advertisements From The Perspective Of Lexical Pragmatics

Lexical pragmatics is a new rapidly developing linguistic branch in pragmatics.It is a new concept which appeared in the foreign linguistic study in the end of 20 th century.Lexical pragmatics dynamically studies meaning of the words based on the context and pays attention to investigating the processes in which uncertain word meanings are modified in use.Lexical pragmatics is a multi-dimensional study of lexicon which researches word usage and understanding in the communication from the perspectives of social pragmatics and cognitive pragmatics.The advertisement language as a kind of particular language,linguists have analyzed it from different aspects.But there are such few studies about the advertising language from the lexical pragmatics.Therefore,this thesis focuses on the lexical pragmatics to explain the pragmatic enrichment in English commercial advertisements.The thesis adopts Relevance Theory of Sperber and Wilson as the theoretical framework to explain the lexical enrichment of words in English commercial advertisements,which has an influence on the analysis and understanding of the English commercial advertisements.The data in this thesis are mostly collected from the Internet and books,which include Modern English Advertisements,Advertisements English and Empirical Research on Advertising and Brand.Three hundred commercial advertisements are selected and collected as the main research samples.Methodologically speaking,the thesis adopts both quantitative and qualitative methods based on data collected.In the collected English commercial advertisements,the quantitative study shows the occurrence frequency of main forms of pragmatic enrichment,the qualitative study is applied to analyze and explain the typical examples of narrowing and broadening in English commercial advertisements.The findings of this study are: first,in the English commercial advertisements,person pronouns and brand names are two common types of pragmatic enrichment in the narrowing and broadening.Second,based on the collected data,the classification of pragmatic narrowing and broadening is more specific.Understanding the different forms of pragmatic enrichment in the English advertisements involves some factors such as encyclopedic knowledge,background information and so on.Third,the pragmatic enrichment is the contextual dynamic process of determining the communicative meaning.Understanding words in the different contexts is a process to find the relevance.The encoded meaning of words is processed to find optimal relevance in order to get the contextual meaning.When the results satisfy the expectations of relevance,the pragmatic process of words will stop.This thesis focuses on the lexical pragmatics to explain the enrichment of English commercial advertisements,which is a tentative supplement for the lexical pragmatics.At the same time this thesis helps people to study and understand the English advertising language.