Ambivalence As A Pragmatic Strategy In Commercial English Advertising Captions

Advertising permeates our life and exerts a considerable influence on our society. The language of advertising is of decisive importance to the persuasiveness and effectiveness of advertising. Vagueness, a strategy often used in advertising, is a remarkable feature of advertising language. So far the study on it has been approached mainly from stylistic, semiotic, discoursal, sociolinguistic, and semantic perspectives. However, ambivalence, which is a special kind of vagueness, has not been paid much attention to as the pragmatic use of vague language in advertising. Enlightened by this gap, this thesis attempts to conduct a systematic analysis on the use of ambivalence in commercial English advertisements from a pragmatic perspective and tries to draw increasing attention to this pragmatic strategy from advertisers and consumers alike.According to Grice's Cooperative Principle, both the speaker and the listener in communication are willing to be cooperative in order to achieve a successful communication. In the process of communication, people usually observe the four conversational maxims of Quantity, Quality, Relation and Manner. When the four maxims are flouted, conversational implicature arises. The use of ambivalent expressions no doubt is one of the ways to flout the maxims, which leads to conversational implicatures. Thus, the theory of Conversational Implicature can appropriately be applied to explain the production and interpretation of the ambivalence in advertising.In order to make this analysis more persuasive, 22 commercial English advertisement captions which contain ambivalence are selected from several most popular English magazines published in recent years or from some collections of advertisements and are analyzed one by one. The study shows that four particular sentence patterns and three kinds of figures of speech are employed in creating ambivalence in advertising. Furthermore, being polite, making the advertisement more interesting, being aesthetic, being economical, and providing a leeway for themselves are the major motivations for the advertiser employing ambivalence as a pragmatic strategy.