Statement In Advertisement And Declarative Indirect Persuasion

This thesis is a pragmatic analysis of statements of products, with a view to exploring the pragmatic mechanisms behind the statements of products in advertisements.It contains four chapters. The first chapter is a brief introduction about the present study. Chapter two reviews previous studies of indirect speech act, persuasion and statement. Chapter three is the main part of this thesis. It analyzes the characteristics of statement in advertisement and discusses some useful pragmatic strategies. The last chapter is a conclusion of this thesis.Methodologically speaking, the study is a qualitative one based on collected advertisements."State"in Chinese means"declare in a systematic way". But as a kind of illocutionary act, its purpose is to commit the speaker (in varying degrees) to something's being the case; the direction of fit is words to the world; the psychological state expressed is belief. And according to Searle's definition of the indirect speech act, the present study defines"statement in advertisement"as declarative indirect persuasion, which performs persuasion indirectly by way of performing a statement. Then the thesis infers from the process that receivers get the information from declarative indirect persuasion. Furthermore, on the basis of the definition, the thesis probes into the relationship between statement and persuasion in advertisements from general usages and discourse structure.The thesis classifies statements into two broad categories: direct statement and indirect statement. It then enumerates the types of advertisements for each one and highlights that a statement in advertisement also has its core part, which makes use of some specific information about the products.The thesis finds that discourse and social roles play important parts in advertisement as well. Social roles in advertisements differ from the social institution and culture; while discourse roles are associated with the information and its sender, or receiver. On the one hand, appropriate roles would be chosen for the products, even some changes between each other, such as a role change from spokesperson/ mouthpiece to speaker and another change from the reverse direction. On the other hand, different receivers take an effect on the statement for products too.The thesis also examines the different parts of advertisement, focusing on the major function of presupposition in advertisement, and some other factors such as vocabulary, grammar rhetoric and culture.In sum, the thesis provides guidance for performing effective persuasion by the way of performing statement.