Application Of Presupposition And Conversational Implicature In English Commercial Advertisement

Commercial advertisement, as an important part of the social language, has affected people's daily life in many ways. Advertising language, being different from daily conversation, spreads in a one-way directional mode and needs to convey more impressive information in limited space and time, with a view to attract attention, arouse interest, stimulate desire, create conviction, and get action. With their inherent characteristics, presupposition and conversational implicature can meet the space-saving and attention-catching ends, thus are frequently applied by advertisers to reinforce the persuasiveness of advertising.The thesis attempts to use 304 pieces of English commercial advertisements, which are printed on the Fortune and Woman's Weekly issued in 2007 as the research material. Based on presupposition and conversational implicature generated from flouting of CP maxims, through case study and statistical results, the research analyzes how presupposition and conversational implicature achieve persuasive effect and to what extent they are applied in English commercial advertisement, especially their application variation in six kinds of commercial advertisement.The author first reviews the historical background of the study on advertising language and theoretical basis of presupposition and implicature. By analyzing their characteristics, their differences in nature are revealed through comparison. Then, the author analyzes with authentic examples that how the concepts of presupposition and conversational implicature effectively function to help an advertiser imply and carry on her intentional meaning through what she has her advertisement say. Besides, their respective working mechanism and functions in advertising are explored. Finally, through a survey on presupposition and conversational implicature, the author further proves the important roles they play in English Commercial Advertising and concludes the functions of each type of presupposition and conversational implicature. Considering the application of presupposition and conversational implicature may be influenced by different characteristics of products, the author conducts another survey on their application in advertisement of different products. Through classifying 304 advertisements according to products, the author selects 6 kinds of commercial advertisement, automobile, airline service, finance and insurance, cosmetics, medicine and wine, which are relatively rich in information. The distributions of both presupposition and conversational implicature are compared among the 6 kinds of advertising, in order to get more specific and detailed application strategies. Besides, the author tries to give reasons for such differences in distribution.The statistic shows that presupposition and conversational implicature are widely used in English commercial advertisement with conversational implicature taking up a larger proportion. Among 304 pieces of English commercial advertisements, 271 pieces contain at least one presupposition or conversational implicature. Of the 271 pieces, 170 pieces adopt presupposition while 215 pieces employ conversational implicature. Among five types of presuppositions, existential presupposition is used most frequently, state presupposition and factive presupposition rank the second and third respectively, while the behavior and belief presupposition are used least frequently; among four types of conversational implicature, the flouting of maxim of Quantity is exploited most frequently, the flouting of maxim of Quality ranks the second, while the flouting of maxim of Manner and Relation is used least frequently.It is worthwhile to note that the distributions of presupposition and conversational implicature do vary in advertisements of six kinds of products: presupposition and conversational implicature are used in a relatively balanced way in ads of cosmetics and medicine. Among five types of presupposition, state presupposition and factive presupposition are used most frequently in ads of service; state presupposition is employed most frequently in ads of medicine; existential presupposition is adopted least frequently in ads of finance and insurance; apart from existential presupposition, other types of presupposition are seldom used in ads of wine. Among four types of conversational implicature, the flouting of maxim of Manner is used less frequently while the flouting of maxim of Quality is used more frequently in ads of finance and insurance. The author attributes the above distributional differences to five factors: desire, visibility, level of trust, durability, and legal restrictions.This thesis hopes to benefit the practical application of presupposition and conversational implicature in advertisement, helping readers to better understand advertisement and providing copywriters with relatively worthy reference.