A Contrastive Research On The Flouting Of Cooperative Principle In Chinese And American Advertising Languages

With the growth of society and economy, advertising, as being the important part of the social culture, has directly and indirectly affected people's daily life including living, work and recreation etc. Advertising, as a form of communication, has also been an object for study. Scholars at home and abroad have been studying advertising language from different perspectives, such as economics, psychology, sociology, as well as linguistics. For instance, Leech has given a detailed description of English advertisements from the aspect of speech sounds, phoneme, grammar and vocabulary. Keiko first used Relevance Theory and context to make a systematic analysis of English and Japanese advertisements. Huang Guowen has conducted a study on advertising language, employing Halliday's Systematic Functional Grammar as theoretical basis, the result of which is both insightful and suggestive.Being the large advertising countries, China and America's import and export trade developed rapidly. And they are deeply penetrating each other's markets in many areas. As an important way of commercial activity, advertisement has attracted more and more attention. This dissertation focus on the flouting of the Grice's Cooperative Principle (abbreviated as CP) in Chinese and American advertising language (abbreviated as CAAL) which leads to the production of implicature. Furthermore, it explores a comparative study on the way of flouting the CP through social values and traditional thinking modes etc. The knowledge of how to successfully create an ad by violating the CP is highly important and significant for the copywriters or advertising agencies, especially when they run a cross-cultural advertising campaign. The studies in this dissertation help not only to enrich linguistic studies but also to promote advertising studies and make previous theoretical studies on advertising more practical. It would be beneficial for both the advertisers and the linguists to make a study of advertising language. The examples are mainly from the Chinese and American newspapers, magazines and Internet. A qualitative and quantitative study is adopted as the research method in this dissertation.