The Analysis On The Vague Terms In Advertisement

Since professor L. Zadeh in the United States put forward the vagueness theory in 1965, a series of new subjects such as fuzzy linguistics, fuzzy mathematics, fuzzy logic, fuzzy psychology came into bloom overseas; in China, scholars like Wu Tieping conducted detailed analysis on the fuzzy words or fuzzy semantics. Based on the research, this thesis analyzes the vagueness phenomena in advertisement from the perspective of pragmatics by adopting the Adaptation Theory of Jef Verschueren.According to Jef Verschueren, he considers the language use as a process of making linguistic choices. He conducts his theory from the three perspectives: the variability, negotiability and adaptability of language. This is the comprehensive framework outlined by the author. Adaptability is the property of language which enables human beings to make negotiable linguistic choices from a variable range of possibilities in such a way as to approach points of satisfaction for communicative needs. This thesis conducts its research based on the Adaptation Theory. Advertising language is the main medium between advertiser and consumer. We try to illustrate the problem from the following two adaptations: one is from the adaptation to the consumer's psychological needs, and the other is from the adaptation to the social conventions. In the former, we categorize the adaptation as follows: The social psychology advertisements concerned are a multi-layered psychological system, which includes the consuming psychology for choosing products, consuming needs and advertising-accepting psychology. When subcategorized in detail, it can be divided into several groups: adapting the quality of products, the costs of products, the value of products to the consuming psychology; Adaptation to pursuing the comfort and convenience, adaptation to pursuing status and identity, adaptation to pursuing the warmness; Adaptation to avoiding the psychology of advertisement resisting, adaptation concerning pursuing the novelty, adaptation concerning protecting the privacy, pursuing the compliment, respecting the character of the consumer.All in all, all the advertisements try to influence the choices for the products. Apart from the adaptation to the psychological states of the addressees, the thesis considers the adaptation to the social conventions. Traditional culture is a psychological tendency for generations in our nation. For instance, the Chinese pay much attention to the filial piety, the get-together, pursuing the happiness and expecting their children to grow healthily either in body or in mind. So the usage of vague terms in advertisement serves as a significant role in the communication between the advertiser and the consumer. There are some personal differences in understanding the connotations of the advertisement because of the influence of personal experience and cultural background of the consumers. The advertiser can realize his marketing goal by adapting to the different psychological and social factors.