A Pragmatic Approach To Advertising English

Whatever we do and wherever we go, we are certain to encounter advertising. Commercials will reach you when you turn on the radio or TV; advertisements will greet you when you pick up a magazine or a newspaper; logos banners will flash before your eyes when you surf on the Internet. Few things in our daily lives are as pervasive and influential as advertising. Eventually, advertising has become a common target of many subjects, linguistics being one, in which advertising language has been considered a special variety of language. So far the study on advertising language has been approached from five main perspectives: stylistic, semiotic, discoursal, sociolinguistic, and pragmatic. Enlightened by all these methods, I will study the advertising language (mainly consumer press advertising English) from the pragmatic perspective.As a special communication between advertisers and consumers, the aim of advertising is to persuade, that is, to ask people to purchase the products. But advertisers can't say this directly because this may offend consumers and therefore advertisers like to employ conversational implicature in advertising. Grice's theory on conversational implicature, the Cooperative Principle and the four maxims of Quantity, Quality, Relation and Manner are the major theoretical support for this study. The flouting of the CP Maxims in advertising is explored in great detail. Then a whole chapter is devoted to the reasons why advertisers apply conversational implicatures in their ads. Several reasons have been spotted, such as to be economical, to make advertising language interesting, to increase the force of advertising message, to be polite etc. Moreover it is pointed out that politeness is the main reason, because advertisers try to show their concern, commendation, agreement, sympathy to consumers and try to be modest sometimes. This thesis also analyzes the influence of pragmatic principles on word choice in advertising, which hasn't been done before.