Fuzziness In Advertising: A Pragmatic Account

Advertising is an important element of our culture because it reflects and attempts to change our life styles. New cultural trends and fashions are first transmitted to the mass culture through advertisements. Advertisements in a broad sense not only introduce products or services, but also imbue people with such ideas and beliefs as maintaining world peace, protecting wild animals, or eliminating smoking. Without advertising, our newspapers, magazines, and radio and television programming would be far different. Hence the study of advertising is of great importance. In the past two decades there has been an enormous upsurge of interest in the linguistic characteristics of advertising. It is generally believed that the basic percepts of good advertising writing are simplicity, brevity, accuracy and precision, and that vagueness, ambiguity, and imprecision should be avoided. However, according to the author's observation, some copywriters demonstrate their competence through their use of a degree of fuzziness which is right for the purpose of their writing. One of the oldest advertising writing formulas is A-I-D-A: attention, interest, desire, action. A successful advertisement should take the formula into account.Interest in the fuzziness of language use and meaning has arisen in recent years. Much of it suggests that fuzziness is present in a great deal of language use, and thattherefore a complete theory of language must have fuzziness as an integral component. Since fuzziness exists widely in all aspects of human life, the study of fuzzy language must be analyzed from the perspective of pragmatics, from the perspective of language using and interpreting. Therefore, the goal of this dissertation is to apply pragmatic principles and theories to analyze those fuzzy expressions or fuzzy rhetoric and to reveal that fuzziness frequently occurs in advertising; the appropriate use of fuzziness can help copywriters or advertisers to achieve their goals successfully. The author illustrates these viewpoints in five chapters:Chapter One is the introduction. Firstly, it introduces the definitions of the term fuzziness since there is a great diversity among linguists in defining fuzziness. Then it illustrates that fuzziness is widely used in advertising and studying fuzziness in advertising is of great importance.Chapter Two firstly introduces four main features of the advertising language. It also points out that understanding fuzziness in advertising is a process of interpretation and fuzziness is context-dependent. Fuzziness helps to convey meanings efficiently. People use language to achieve their specific purposes in accordance with two basic language principles: cooperation and least effort. Also people tend to use limited words to express unlimited meanings which involve fuzziness or indeterminacy. Fuzziness can improve accuracy and make advertisements impressive, persuasive and aesthetic.Chapter Three uses pragmatic principles and theories: the Co-operative Principle, the Politeness Principle and Relevance Theory, to analyze fuzziness in advertising in details. There are four maxims in Grice's CP (Quality, Quantity, Relevance and Manner). One way in which the maxims are relevant to fuzziness in advertising is that fuzzy expressions may be used to enable copywriters to follow the maxims, that is, the advertising writing must be truthful and informative. Copywriters will also violate the maxims for the sake of self-protection or of grabbing the attention of audiences or readers. There are six maxims in Leech's PP (Tact, Generosity, Approbation, Modesty, Agreement and Sympathy). Copywriters have to follow the maxims of the PP by recommending the expression of polite rather than impolite beliefs. They must tell their audiences or readers the benefit of a product or a service and must try to seek agreement with audiences orreaders. In addition, euphemisms and hedges can be considered as two aspects of politeness in advertising. Euphemisms can be used to disguise unpleasant subjects, and hedges, as d...