Study Of Presupposition In Chinese And English Advertizing Texts

As an effective means for transmitting commercial information, advertisements have gradually infiltrated people’s daily life and become an integral part of our modern society. Linguists have done some researches and explorations into the advertising language from different points of view due to the important functions that advertisements perform. Some linguists in the western countries carried out the research on the characteristics of advertising language from the perspectives of stylistics, semeiology, sociolinguistics, rhetoric and pragmatics, etc. In China, people started the research on the language of advertisements much later and a certain gap between that and the one carried out in the western developed countries, Hong Kong and Taiwan is to be bridged. What is more insufficient is the exploration of the theories underlying the advertisements. The common characteristics shared by presupposition and advertising language in conveying meaning, that is, transmitting the implied information in a veiled and indirect way, have turned presupposition to be one of the theoretical frameworks for constructing and interpreting advertising texts.It is reckoned that the production and interpretation of advertisements can not be separated from both the advertiser’s and its receivers’analysis and understanding of presupposition. Therefore, a theoretical background of presupposition and methods are presented first, with which both English and Chinese advertising texts are analyzed. The final goal is to explore how the advertising texts could achieve their purposes and perform their functions by using presuppositions.In this research, the presuppositions hidden in the advertising texts are classified into four categories to be discussed, that is, semantic presupposition, pragmatic presupposition, cultural presupposition and cognitive presupposition due to the special characteristics of advertising languages and based on the previous researches on the Presupposition Theory. Semantic presupposition is the initial stage in the research of the Theory, which shows the relations between components of sentences within the language system, or the relations between two semantic propositions. Pragmatic presupposition reveals the relations between utterances and contexts in communication. Cultural presupposition refers to the Social Awareness or the Group Awareness formed with the culture in a certain nation or society, that is, the fixed thinking and behaving patterns. It can be considered as extension of the research on presupposition into the cultural area, which manifests the relation between realistic culture and cultural background of the sentences. Cognitive presupposition shows how people process the information during communication, which is a dynamic reaction to a given speech. The four kinds of presupposition contact and compensate for one another, which are utilized to help people understand the natural language of advertisements more completely and deeply.This dissertation points out the deficiencies existing in the study of the presuppositions in advertising texts in the past and sets its target for research based on the literature review of the research on both the advertising languages and the Presupposition Theory. Then the author analyses the4different kinds of presuppositions in Chinese and English advertising texts in order to discover the functions of presupposition in helping people convey and interpret advertising languages. The contrastive analysis of presuppositions in advertising languages aims at helping people identify the similarities and differences when they are used in the two languages. Finally the author analyses and summarizes how presuppositions can effectively be made use of in Chinese advertising texts, including the critical thinking of the inappropriate use of them, analysis of their functions, the applying principles and the transfer of the presupposition information in the advertising texts from one language to the other through translation.To sum up, this study has updated the research paradigm, especially the systematic research on the cultural presupposition has deepened people’s understanding of the cultural connotation, while the innovative research of pragmatic presupposition has opened a new window for people’s producing and interpreting the advertising texts. The contrastive analysis of the presuppositions will benefit people with understanding and translating the cross-language advertisements. Therefore, the ultimate goal of the research lies in helping potential consumers interpret the profound meaning of the advertising texts, in the meanwhile, providing some theoretical and practical guidance in improving the quality and effectiveness of Chinese advertisements from the perspective of language use.