Analyzing Vagueness In Advertising Language-A Relevance-theoretic Approach

Advertisements commonly exist in our daily life and vagueness is one important feature of advertisements. The research on vague language in advertisements has provided much literature but as for why advertisers use a large amount of vague language and how consumers go through the cognitive processes when interpreting vague language is less considered. Relevance theory is mainly concerned with cognition and communication and thus this thesis is intended to use relevance theory as the theoretical framework.Since its coming into being, relevance theory has been applied to many research fields, but research on using relevance theory to analyze the vague language in advertising is far from enough. The writer firstly reviews previous studies on vagueness, mainly including the definition of vagueness, and studies on vagueness from different perspectives, such as of pragmatics, cognition, natural language understanding, psychology, and cognitive semantics, etc. Then she points out the insufficiency on vague language in advertising and the significance of the study.The author reviews many important concepts in relevance theory, such as ostensive-inferential principle,"loose"use of language, communication and cognition, logical, encyclopedic and lexical information, mutual manifestness and explicature and implicature. These concepts play an important role for understanding vague language in advertising, and also make a foreshadowing for analyzing vague language in advertising and the cognitive processes in understanding vague language within the framework of relevance theory.Then the writer discusses the effectiveness of relevance theory for explaining vagueness in advertising by using examples of advertisements. First most language in our daily life contains vague and loose use and relevance theory assumes that language understanding involves decoding and inference and is mainly guided by relevance principle. In order to achieve optimal relevance, the audience must have a balance between cognitive efforts and contextual effects. Sometimes understanding vague language needs less cognitive effort but can achieve the same contextual effect as in the case of precise language. In this sense, people tend to use vague language. Sperber and Wilson thought that the hearer does not need to infer all the logical and contextual implications of the speaker, but only needs to find the most relevant information and achieve the purpose of communication. Under this circumstance, the speaker doesn't have to be one hundred percent precise, but only needs to make the hearer able to infer the communicated information, but the prerequisite is that the speaker must suppose the hearer can infer the information. Thus, the choice of way of expression in an advertisement is also dependent on the evaluation of advertisers about the cognitive abilities of consumers and the assumption of mutual manifestness. Moreover, in order to help consumers get the conveyed information of an advertisement, the advertiser not only conveys representational meaning but also procedural meaning. Vague language offers different implications and therefore can help consumers achieve relevance between vague language and intended information of advertisements. Sometimes, vagueness in advertisements is realized by some humorous rhetorical devices which can bring pleasant experience to consumers. Studies showed that giving pleasant experience to consumers can increase the persuasiveness of advertising, even if consumers need more cognitive efforts to achieve relevance. What's more, in understanding vague language, consumers some times rely on logical, encyclopedic and lexical information to reach optimal relevance.Through this analysis, the writer illustrates the effectiveness of relevance theory in explaining vague language in advertising. Based on this analysis, the cognitive processes consumers go through when interpreting vague language is also explained, that is, through the hearer identifies one logical form for the speaker's utterance, the hearer makes an inferential development of this logical form, resolves reference assignment, makes enrichment and finally derives implicatures.On this basis, the writer illustrates the positive and negative effect of using vague language in advertising. The positive effects are enhancing the expressiveness of advertising language, increasing the flexibility of language communication and making language communication more accurate and creating humorous effects. The negative effect is that in the inferential process there may be relevance improper and inconsistency with the communicated information of advertisements, where consumers may be misled. Some deceptive advertisements in reality exploits relevance improper to a deceive consumers in order to achieve the purpose of advertising.Academically, the thesis applies relevance theory to the analysis of vague language and analyzes the cognitive processes in understanding vague language. Based on the analysis it points out the relevance improper phenomenon in advertising, which is the innovation of this thesis. Practically, this thesis analyzes the deceptiveness of false advertisements, which may help consumers to enhance alertness in reading advertising. Thus it is has certain practical and social significance.