A Study Of Pragmatic Presupposition In Advertising Language

Advertising plays a very important role in modern economy and social life.Advertising language, the soul of advertising, has a close relationship with the successof ads. The language of advertising is basically persuasive, aiming to inform thepotential consumers of the advertised products or services and persuade them to takepurchase actions. Therefore, all possible means, linguistic or non-linguistic, have beenadopted by advertising copywriters to serve the dual purposes of informing andpersuading of advertising language. As a very important topic in pragmatics,presupposition is frequently employed in order to enhance the effects of persuasion inads because of its own special properties and characteristics. So, it is significant tostudy advertising language from the perspective of pragmatic presupposition.Previous researches on advertising language mainly overemphasize the trivialityof words and phrases, the rhetoric, and communicative purposes of advertisinglanguage without a good theoretical framework. Although many scholars have studiedadvertising language from the perspective of pragmatics, few works and papers haveinvolved the analysis of pragmatic presupposition in the studies of advertisinglanguage. Therefore, the author attempts to explore tentatively the workingmechanism of pragmatic presupposition in the headlines and slogans of 100 ads (74valid ads), which are mainly collected from world-famous English magazines. Theauthor hopes that this study can give theoretical guidance of pragmatic presuppositionfor ads copywriters and help them achieve their expected goals.In this study, the author applies pragmatic presupposition as a basic theory,meanwhile touching on Relevance Theory and Face Theory. This thesis is based onthe combination of a qualitative study and a quantitative study, with the qualitativeone being the main method. The analysis of the classifications of pragmaticpresupposition, presupposition triggers and the functions of pragmatic presuppositionin advertising language belongs to a qualitative study while the statistical analysis ofthe distribution and frequency of pragmatic presupposition, its classifications andpresupposition triggers belongs to a quantitative study.Results show that pragmatic presupposition occurs in 74% of the collected 100ads;existential presupposition accounts for the largest percentage (50%) among allthe classifications of pragmatic presupposition, followed by state presupposition(19.79%) and fact presupposition (14.58%), and the frequency of them are related toads types;almost all the presupposition triggers except "definite descriptions" cantrigger different classifications of pragmatic presupposition, and among all thepresupposition triggers, "definite descriptions" account for the largest percentage(38.54%), followed by "comparisons and contrasts" (14.58%), "questions" (12.5%)and "factive verbs" (8.33%);in advertising marketing strategies, pragmaticpresupposition has euphemism function, concealment function, persuasion functionand self-protection function;the application of pragmatic presupposition can makeadvertising language concise, humorous, diverse and implicit.It has been concluded that pragmatic presupposition occurs frequently inadvertising language, and plays an important part in fulfilling the ultimate purposes ofadvertising. This study has both theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, itmight enrich the understanding of pragmatic presupposition and modify the existingstudies of advertising language. Practically, it can help advertising copywriters designmore attractive and successful ads and make daily communication more efficient.