A Research On The Implicatures In Chinese Advertising From The Perspective Of The Cooperative Principle

With the development of the market economy today, advertisements as a means of sales promotion have spread quickly through all over the world and directly affected people's work or daily lives. Each merchant tries his or her best to create wonderful ads to catch consumers'attention, arouse their interest which will stimulate consumers'purchasing desire and then achieve the goal of promoting products. Advertising language is an indispensable element in advertising and also an important factor to realize advertising purpose. Therefore, advertising is a practical writing full of commercial value.In recent years, many scholars have carefully explored this new and developing field in terms of economics, aesthetics, acoustics, psychology and so on. Fruitful achievements have been made in these aspects. Unfortunately, compared with the above aspects, the research on advertising language is not comprehensive and full-sided. Ever since Geoffrey Leech pioneered the linguistic analysis of advertising language, it has been well studied from the perspective of sociolinguistics, cross-cultural studies and stylistics, etc. However, it is found that few efforts have been made on the systematic analysis of the relationship between Chinese advertising language and Cooperative Principle, which has been proved to be of great influence on the development of pragmatics and advertising.This thesis limits its scope of analysis to the Chinese consumer advertisements, especially food ads and ads on articles of everyday use, in magazines, newspapers, textbooks, etc and then a qualitative case study is adopted as a research method. The CP is the theoretical basis applied to the analysis of observing and flouting the maxims of CP in Chinese advertising language and the inference of the implied meaning of advertising. The findings show that it is a main feature for Chinese advertising language to produce implicatures in special context by flouting the maxims of CP. The application of the CP in Chinese advertising has a positive impact on the persuasiveness of advertising. However, the improper use of CP will produce so many similar ads without any originality and some ads are even misunderstood by consumers. At the same time, the author tries to find out some sources of materials in Chinese advertising of flouting maxims of CP. On the one hand, the conclusions from the present study offer a wider way for advertising designers to create excellent ads and also make them pay attention to some problems existing in ads. On the other hand, it is also of great help for consumers to understand the implied meaning of ads and avoid being tempted into buying some poor quality products by some deceptive advertising.