A Study On Pragmatic Presupposition In Advertising Language

Advertisement is a special communicative form. From pragmatic point of view, advertising propaganda is a kind of pragmatic behavior, to speak concretely, is a kind of persuasive speech act. In recent years, people pay more and more attention to advertising language. A common phenomenon in advertisement has drawn people's attention and that's presupposition in advertisement.The paper mainly probes into the usage of presupposition theories in advertising language. In the meantime, because advertisements are greatly influenced by culture, the influence of culture on advertisements should be studied.The first part outlines the contents of the whole thesis. It expounds from two aspects: the background to the study and the purpose of the paper.The second part analyzes the presupposition theory generally. It summarizes the viewpoints of presupposition theory according to different linguists and philosophers. There are viewpoints of Western scholars like Frege, Bertrand Russell, Strawson, Stephen C.Levinson, and George Yule. Also there are viewpoints of Chinese linguists like He Zhaoxiong, He Ziran, Jiang Wangqi and Chen Xinren.The third part examines the theoretical foundation of pragmatic presupposition and its characteristics. There are two basic types of presuppositions: semantic presupposition and pragmatic presupposition. The presupposition of advertisements belongs to pragmatic presupposition. Presupposition is a common inference phenomenon in advertising language. Presupposition is the known common sense between the both sides in language communication, or is the information which can be inferred according to context after words. So it is often contained in the meaning of a sentence and generally is not shown literally. In order for advertising language to communicate more information and be full of agitation, advertisements designers often use semantic presupposition and pragmatic presupposition.The forth part explores the application of pragmatic presupposition in advertisement. The study of some simple knowledge of advertisement can help us to understand advertisement. Especially the study of the relationship between advertisement and receptors can help us to grasp the function and characteristics of advertisement. From the social psychology, we can classify the pragmatic presupposition in advertising language as factive presupposition, belief presupposition, state presupposition and begavior presupposition. And these points govern the very important roles of pragmatic presupposition in advertisement. Pragmatic presupposition can not only make advertising language succinct and interesting, but also can enlarge the amount of information in advertisement. Furthermore pragmatic presupposition can adequately help advertisement designers to achieve their anticipating goals according to marketing requirements.The fifth part is framed on the cultural influence on advertisement. Some pragmaticpresuppositions are inferred according to common knowledge by advertisement designers and advertising objects. Common knowledge plays a very important role in language communication and if short of common knowledge, the communication will suffer a setback. Advertisement designers take notice of this point and so always make advertising objects take the advantage of common knowledge to do the inference themselves in advertising language. Cross-cultural communication has become a protruding characteristic of economy globalization. Therefore the study of advertisement should not be restricted within the linguistic field because advertisement is an important section of cross-cultural social pragmatics. Culture establishes basis for the effective and fast transmission of advertisement and advertisement provides new developing juncture for the propagation of culture. The two aspects interact during the whole course of transmission.From the above study we can see that the study on pragmatic presupposition in advertising language has realistic significance. The characteristics of presupposition are alike those of advertisement. Presupposition can serve the persuasive purpose of advertisement in various points of view. So in this way, presupposition can not only expand the amount of information and agitate the customers, but avoid some direct assertions which are forbidden in advertising law. Also presupposition is an important notion in pragmatics and advertisement is an exceptional case in practical language use. So it is necessary for us to study them together. The former can enhance the quality of language in advertisement and the latter can provide real materials for the former to study and broaden the scope of its study.