Fuzzy Expressions In Advertising English And Their Potential Deceptivity

Whether we like it or not, advertising has overwhelmingly penetrated every comer of our life and the study of advertising has become an important focus of mass communication studies. We can approach advertising from a variety of perspectives. According to Cook (1992), "an advertisement is an interaction of such elements as participants, function, substance, pictures, music, a society, paralanguage, language, a situation, other advertisements and other discourse." However, what interests me most is the phenomenon of fuzzy expressions, the cognitive models on which the interpretation of fuzzy expressions depends in a text-based situation and how fuzzy expressions constitute deceptivity in advertisements. When we talk about fuzzy expressions in advertisements, we refer to a linguistic expression that 1) is likely to mislead consumers, 2) has a blurred boundary, 3) has borderline cases, 4) is processed in a text-based situation or without an immediate context The last criterion is very important in our discussion of deceptivity of fuzzy expressions, which is seldom touched by scholars. To better understand how fuzzy expressions are realized in the discourse of advertising , this thesis presents a detailed discussion within the framework of fuzziness theory.The term "deceptivity" in this dissertation means "potential deception". That is to say, fuzzy expressions in advertising do not necessarily lead to deception. Based on the latest findings of philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, psychology and psycholinguistics, this dissertation aims to demonstrate that the language of advertising is fraught with fuzzy expressions and such fuzzy expressions are likely to lead to discrepancy between text-based impressions and reality.The data relevant to the study is chosen from thousands of advertising slogans. I choose at random 300 advertising slogans from different foreign magazines and newspapers. Most of them are mainly from Time, US News & World Report, People, Reader's Digest and Newsweek. The reason for choosing slogans as the main data in the present study is that slogans are widely regarded as the soul of advertising. It is a means of focusing attention and exhorting to action. So slogans must embrace the typical features that advertising...