On The Non-Observance Of The Cooperative Principle In Advertising--From The Perspective Of The Politeness Principle

Advertising in one form or another has been around for thousands of years, but it has never been so pervasive and powerful in human life like today. The language of advertising, among other aids and appeals, is of decisive importance to the persuasiveness and effectiveness of advertisements. Ever since Geoffrey Leech pioneered the linguistic analysis of advertising language, it has been well addressed from the perspectives of sociolinguistics, cross-cultural studies, stylistics and pragmatics, etc. However, it is found that few efforts have been spread on the systematic analysis of the relationship between advertising language and the Cooperative Principle as well as the Politeness Principle, which have proved to be of great influence in the development of pragmatics. This thesis explores the non-observance of the CP in advertising language from the perspective of the PP. Geoffrey Leech proposes the PP as rescuing the CP from the deviations, which is adopted as the theoretical basis of this analysis. It is hypothesized that the advertiser prefers the PP to the CP for the sake of persuasion and sales promotion. This pragmatic study limits its scope of analysis to the print advertising in English magazines and a qualitative case study is adopted as the research method. The CP and the PP are respectively applied to the inference of the implied meaning of advertising, which lays great impact on the persuasiveness of advertising. Authentic examples are then employed to analyze the non-observance of the CP from the perspective of the PP, attempting to further explain the relationship of cooperation and politeness as two basic concerns of the advertiser. Some theories from other disciplines like consumer psychology and cultural studies are taken to extend the case analysis. Some general conclusions are finally drawn on the distinctive features of advertising language in terms of pragmatics. Within the scope of this study, the hypothesis has been proved.