Pragmatic Presupposition In Advertisements

In this era of rapid social and technological advancement, advertisement has become a very important part of our daily life. The mass media, the TV, radio, Internet, newspaper, magazine and even the street, are full of advertisements. The purpose of advertising is to persuade the consumers to purchase products or services. The skillful use of language is of paramount importance in advertising. In recent years, philosophers, psychologists, rhetoricians, linguists and some other scholars have paid much attention to this unique form of language in advertising. According to Vestergaard and Schroder(1985), advertising language has three fundamental functions: the informative function, the persuasive function and the reflective function. Many scholars have tried to analyze these functions via various types of advertisements from different perspectives. In the previous investigations, the important approaches to the analysis of different advertisements are the semiotic approach, the linguistic approach, the communicative approach and the pragmatic approach.Although previous studies on advertising language have made great contributions to the understanding of advertisement, there are still many unsolved problems. In order to improve our current knowledge about advertising language, the author of the thesis attempts to analyze advertising language by a new approach---the pragmatic presupposition approach. This thesis aims to explore the potential role of pragmatic presupposition in advertising language.When we talk about pragmatic presupposition, we should understand what is presupposition. The notion of presupposition is originated from the field of philosophy and it was originally proposed by a German philosopher, Ferge in 1892(Levinson, 2001:169). In the 1960s, presupposition entered the area of linguistics and started as a new concept in semantics. Later in the 1970s, presupposition has emerged in the realm of Pragmatics.Thus, in the thesis, the author systematically introduces the two categories of presupposition: semantic presupposition, and pragmatic presupposition. Based on a practical approach, this thesis focus on the pragmatic presupposition.According to Levinson(2001), pragmatic presupposition has two properties: felicity and mutual knowledge, which are the fundamental properties. Then, the author further investigates three more characteristics of pragmatic presupposition, i.e.unidirectionality, subjectiveness and latency based on Chen Xinren's viewpoint. Based on these characteristics of pragmatic presupposition, this thesis maintains that the pragmatic presuppositions in advertisements can be classified into four types according to Chen Xinren's viewpoint. They are factive presupposition, state presupposition, belief presupposition and behavior presupposition. Just because of these different types of pragmatic presuppositions in advertisements, the advertising can shorten the psychological distance between the advertisers and consumers.Why do advertisers often use pragmatic presupposition in designing advertisements? In this thesis, the author explains the reason. That is, the unique functions of pragmatic presupposition in advertisements make advertisers adopt pragmatic presupposition as an effective strategy to promote their products or services. Although some scholars have mentioned the functions of presupposition in advertisements, their discussions are not systematic and comprehensive. This thesis explores four functions of pragmatic presupposition in advertisement, namely, function of brevetting language, function of strengthening persuasion, function of euphemism and function of propagating culture according to the characteristics of pragmatic presupposition.To sum up, the present study takes a practical and theoretical approach to analyze advertising language. This study can give theoretical guidance to the application of pragmatic presupposition in advertising language and help advertisers create more attractive advertisements.