A Study Of Presupposition And Implicature In Advertising Language

Advertisements exist almost everywhere in our realistic life. It has become a major part of the social-cultural communication. Concerning the important role of advertising, more and more experts and scholars have paid close attention to it. From different points of view, many linguists also have been working on advertising language ?the most important communicative factor of advertising, exploring the basic laws and theoretic instructions in order to make advertising language more scientific and persuasive and ultimately help advertising achieve its desired objectives. As the major topics of linguistics, presupposition and implicature have their own characteristics and thus are frequently exploited by advertisers to reinforce the persuasiveness of advertising. From the pragmatic perspective, the dissertation attempts to study how advertising language exploits presupposition and implicature in order to help advertising obtain the best effect.Firstly, the author reviews the historical background and theoretic basis of the study on presupposition and implicature. She respectively analyses their characteristics and reveals their difference in nature through a series of comparisons.Secondly, the author discusses the functions of presupposition and implicature and finds they are very helpful for advertising to develop its persuasiveness.Thirdly, the author studies the working mechanism of presupposition and implicature. In advertising, pragmatic presupposition is closely related to some factors including customers' psychology, presupposition triggers and cultural differences, which have a strong impact on the pragmatic strategies of presupposition. Flouting the CP and Four Maxims will generate conversational implicature in advertising, which makes advertising creative and meaningful. Nevertheless,inappropriately flouting the CP and Four Maxims is likely to result in negative influence on advertising.Finally, through a survey on presupposition and implicature in advertising, the author makes sure that presupposition and implicature really play an important role in advertising. According to the survey, to different degrees advertisements use presupposition and implicature to make claims about the benefits or effectiveness of the products. It shows that their difference in nature makes these two pragmatic inferences have different pragmatic strategies in advertising.In conclusion, the role that presupposition and implicature play in advertising is not replaceable. Presupposition and implicature help advertising achieve desired effect and realize its objectives in a very effective way.