A Study Of The Pragmatic Vagueness In Advertising

Pragmatic vagueness refers to a communicative strategy, which is carried out by the manipulation of vague language to achieve certain communicative goals. Under the instruction of Verschueren's Linguistic Adaptation Theory, this dissertation explores the pragmatic vagueness in advertising from the angle of language production. The study aims at better directing both advertisers' advertisement-making and audience's advertisement-interpretation.According to Verschueren, pragmatics is a general cognitive, social and cultural perspective on linguistic phenomena in relation to their usage in forms of behaviour (or social action). Based on this pragmatic thinking, he puts forward the Linguistic Adaptation Theory, whose key notions include: 1) using language is a process of the continuous making of linguistic choices (both forms and strategies); 2) three properties of language, i.e. variability, negotiability and adaptability, make the process possible; 3) the concept of adaptability assigns four angles of investigation to language use, i.e. contextual correlates of adaptability, structural objects of adaptability, the dynamics of adaptability, and the salience of adaptation process.In advertising, the communicative strategy of pragmatic vagueness is frequently exploited by advertisers to satisfy certain communicative needs. In line with the Linguistic Adaptation Theory, the present study makes a qualitative analysis of the data extracted from various advertisements and investigates the variability, adaptability and functions of pragmatic vagueness in advertising. To be more exact, the following three research questions are dynamically approached: 1) What are the linguistic choices (i.e. the linguistic devices or manipulations) in advertising that put the communicative strategy of pragmatic vagueness into action? 2) How is advertising language adapted to different non-linguistic contextual correlates (i.e. physical world, social world and mental world) by means of pragmatic vagueness? 3) What are the pragmatic effects (i.e. communicative functions) that the strategy of pragmatic vagueness in advertising can perform?The scrutiny of the data collected reveals that the strategy of pragmatic vagueness in advertising can be activated by punning, hedging, blurring numerals and quantifiers,resorting to commendatory evaluative adjectives, using euphemisms, generating conversational implicature, employing indirect speech acts, and exploiting figure of speech. Besides, the non-linguistic contextual correlates that advertising language adapts to by means of pragmatic vagueness encompass audience's emotion, personality, material and non-material pursuit; advertisers' need of security; social conventions; physical setting and the totality of persons present in the speech event of an advertisement. In addition, pragmatic vagueness in advertising can increase the attention value and memory value of an advertisement, enhance the flexibility of an advertisement, improve the appropriateness of an advertisement, condense an advertisement, create rhetorical and aesthetical effects and produce negative effects as well.