A Pragmatic Analysis On The Application Of Vague Language In Commercial Advertising

With the appearance of Zadeh's "fuzzy sets" theory in 1965, more and more people do their researches on the basis of vagueness and there has emerged a "vagueness rush" in different scopes. A lot of foreign linguists started their study on vagueness from the late of 1970s. Prof. Wu Tieping's "On vagueness" published in 1979 played the role of eye-opener for Chinese linguists. But application of vague language in various means of contemporary business communication including advertisement calls for further research efforts. This thesis, therefore, based on the previous studies, attempts to carry out some work by applying pragmatic theory framework to vagueness in advertising language and approach advertising communication from a brand-new perspective. Equipped with the rationale of pragmatics, especially the principle and development of the Gricean Theory of Cooperative Principle and its four maxims, this thesis extends the CP theory to cover a broader sphere of social communication-language in advertisement, and analyzes vagueness in advertising language and its positive and negative functions.The thesis consists of five chapters:In Chapter one, general introduction about this thesis was given.In Chapter two, a literature review of the development of vague language is made, and the definition of vagueness is given. The purpose and the significance of the present study were expressed. In addition, the theoretical background of the thesis was given.Chapter three analyzes the role of vague language in commercial advertising through a compact corpus and documentary analysis from pragmatic prospective. The primary aim of this corpus study is to find the distribution of vague language cases over violation of the maxims of the Gricean Cooperative Principle and also the application of hedges.Chapter four aims at explicating the pragmatic functions of vagueness in advertising.Chapter five draws a conclusion to the significance of the present study and points out its limitations, and puts forward some suggestions for further researches.