An Analysis On The Non-observance Of Cooperative Principle In Print Ads

Whether we like it or not, advertising has overwhelmingly penetrated every corner of our life. People are being seduced, brainwashed and turned into"model consumers". Advertisements are designed to attract consumers'attention, arouse their interests, stimulate their desires, create conviction, and finally persuade them to take the purchase action. To fulfill these goals, the advertiser will resort to all kinds of techniques including sound, language, image, motion, and so on. Copywriting is the infrastructure in print advertising and it deserves substantial attention.In the field of linguistics, studies on advertising language are mainly from the perspectives of semiotics, stylistics, sociolinguistics and pragmatics etc. However, it is found that few efforts have been spread on systematic analyses of the relationship between advertising language and the Cooperative Principle (CP) as well as the Goal-intention Principle (GP), which have proved to be of great influence in the development of pragmatics.This thesis takes Cooperative Principle and Goal-intention Principle as the theoretical foundations. It investigates qualitatively how the print advertising language is communicated and interpreted. Based on the author's preliminary investigation on many print advertisements, she finds that CP is frequently violated in advertising, thus she proposes a hypothesis that the advertiser prefers GP to CP for the sake of persuasion and promotion in hope that the GP can provide a satisfying explanation for the non-observance of the CP in print advertisements.In the case study, 30 of the 200 authentic ads collected by this author are analyzed to probe into the ways of the non-observance of CP as a promoting strategy. GP gives detailed explanations for the violation of each maxim of CP, and the effects achieved are also illustrated. Among the five types of non-observance of CP, the flouting of CP maxims is much more attached on. Further discussion is carried out on the explanatory power of GP. Through the case analysis, some pragmatic features of print advertising language can be generated. Firstly, advertising occurs in the circumstances of lacking trust and co-operation between the advertiser and the readers. To make advertisements...