An Analysis Of Presupposition In Advertising Language

In this economic society in which information is prevailing, advertisements are found here and there, and play a very important role in our daily life. More and more importance is attached to the research of advertising language. "Advertising is based on the art of language which is a pillar of advertising art." The art of language can help establish good imagine for corporations or manufactures by various kinds of language signs, the functions of which are to build an ideal advertising atmosphere, to attract people's attention, to make them believe, and to make them buy. Nevertheless, the functions of advertisement, informing and persuading, always give rise to the fact that trust and co-operation between the interlocutors are limited or lacking. Advertisers are concerned about the way in which advertising language serves the function of advertisement effectively without causing the recipients' repulsion and resistance. As a very important topic in linguistics, especially in pragmatics, presupposition is frequently employed in order to enhance the informative and persuasive function of advertising language implicitly because of its own special properties and characteristics, In China, the study of advertisement has developed rapidly, however, to study advertising language from the perspective of presupposition has been scant. Thereby this thesis is a tentative attempt to study the working mechanism of presupposition in advertising language.This thesis refers to the historical background and theoretical background of the study of presupposition and indicates the characteristics of presupposition tally with the requirements of advertising language, which can serve the functions of advertisement from different aspects. In addition, this thesis describes the classification and realization of presupposition in advertisement and analyses the close relationship between presupposition and advertising language forms, advertising information, advertising discourse, and advertising strategies with the relevance theory, face theory and related discourse theory.This thesis indicates presupposition is used extensively in advertisements in various forms, such as existential presupposition, factive presupposition, state presupposition, belief presupposition and act presupposition. Their linguistic realizations of presupposition in advertisement are dealt with from phonetic, semantic, syntactic as well as pragmatic perspective. Through the analysis of the advertisements,it is known that the properties of presupposition, such as subjectivity, variety, latency, etc can be used as a strategy in the advertising texts to accomplish the ultimate purpose of advertising and enhance the persuasiveness and attractiveness of the advertisement. Finally, this study shows presupposition can be used to support relevance theory. On the one hand, relevance theory has certain explanation power for this phenomenon; on the other hand, the study of presupposition can further prove the validity and feasibility of relevance theory.This study is quite implicational both practically and theoretically. Practically, this study can help advertisers create more scientific and attractive designing of advertisements and achieve their goals. Theoretically, it might shed light on the significance of presupposition, enrich the understanding of presupposition and modify the existing study of advertising language.