Vagueness In Chinese Advertising: A Pragmatic Account

Linguistic vagueness is one of the distinct characteristics of natural language, so it is with advertising language. During recent years, great success has been achieved in the study of vague linguistics, and more and more people do their research on the basis of vagueness. But application of vague language in various means of contemporary business communication including advertisement, from a pragmatic perspective, calls for further research efforts.This thesis, therefore, based on the previous studies, attempts to carry out a qualitative study by applying pragmatic theory framework to vagueness in Chinese advertising language and approach advertising communication from a brand-new perspective. Equipped with rationale of pragmatics, especially the principle and development of the Gricean Theory of cooperative principle and its four maxims, this thesis extends the CP theory to cover a broader sphere of social communication—language in advertising, and analyzes vagueness in Chinese commercial advertisements and its positive and negative functions. Advertising is not used here only as a source of data to illustrate a theoretical concept, but it is itself to be illuminated through the explication of vagueness.