On Pragmatic Presupposition In Chinese TV Advertisements

Advertisement has become one of the indispensable components of people's social life. As a kind of persuasive language, advertising has the ultimate goal of persuading the potential consumers to take purchase action. The advertisers often employ pragmatic presupposition, one of the important linguistic means to serve the dual purposes of informing and persuading. Pragmatic presupposition can serve advertising language because it has special characteristics such as felicity, mutual knowledge, unidirectionality, subjectiveness and latency, which can not only satisfy the linguistic requisition of advertisement but also perform the persuasive function without using direct assertions in a safer way. The thesis explores tentatively the employment of pragmatic presupposition in Chinese TV advertisements.The data used in the study are drawn from 100 Chinese TV advertisement fragments. Based on the combination of a qualitative study and a quantitative study, the thesis explores distribution and frequency of pragmatic presupposition in the selected Chinese TV advertisements, distribution and employment of presupposition triggers in Chinese TV advertisements, classifications of pragmatic presupposition in Chinese TV advertisements and functions of pragmatic presupposition in Chinese TV advertisements.The thesis consists of the following main parts. Chapter one introduces the research questions, the significance and the organization scheme of the thesis. Chapter two is literature review. It traces the historical origin and general development of the presupposition theories from semantic and pragmatic perspectives and reviews previous studies on advertising language. Take presupposition as the basic theory, the thesis attempts to study the advertising language from the perspective of pragmatic presupposition. Chapter three introduces the data collection and research method. Chapter four is the core of the thesis. Data analysis shows pragmatic presupposition is widely distributed in Chinese TV advertisements. Presupposition-triggers play an important role in the realization of pragmatic presupposition. Combining the features of Chinese and English presupposition-triggers, the thesis lists fourteen kinds of presupposition-triggers: definite descriptions, quantifiers, mood adverbs, state-durative adverbs, negative adverbs, factive verbs, implicative verbs, change of state verbs, iteratives, psychological verbs, comparisons and contrast, questions, counterfactual conditionals, cleft sentences and implicit clefts with stressed constituents. The statistics shows that'definite descriptions'accounts for the largest percentage,'comparisons and contrast'second, then'negative adverbs'and'psychological verbs'follows. Different presupposition triggers can trigger different classifications of pragmatic presupposition. The thesis summarizes eight classifications of pragmatic presuppositions: existential presupposition, factive presupposition, state presupposition, belief presupposition, behavior presupposition, atmosphere presupposition, personality presupposition and concept presupposition. The data analysis reveals that existential presupposition appears in the highest frequency, factive presupposition occupies the second largest position then state presupposition follows. Presupposition as one of the most effective advertising strategies, it plays an important role in helping advertising achieve its persuasion goal and it has economical function, emotional function, latent function and persuasive function. Chapter Five is the concluding part of the thesis, including a general summary of major findings, contributions, limitations and future research suggestions.This study contributes to provide a possible theoretical guidance to make advertisers better understand how presupposition works in advertisements, and in practice, it can help them create more attractive, persuasive and high-quality advertisements.