Pragmatic Values Of Presupposition In Advertising Language

People in today's world are living in the sea of advertisements. No matter you like it or not, you can't escape the influences of it. Newspapers, magazines, radios and TV programs, even the flyers a stranger gives to you on the street, are full of advertisements. No one would deny the fact that the advertisements provide us with information about the fast-changing world as much as we need.Businessmen use advertisements as an effective tool to publicize and sell their products. As more and more people realize the importance and necessity of advertisement, economists, artist and psychologist all pay much attention to the study of advertisement. Linguists, too, attach great importance to the language of advertisement quantitatively and qualitatively. As a very important topic in linguistics, especially in pragmatics, presupposition is frequently employed in order to enhance the effects of persuasion in advertisements because of its own special properties and characteristics .Presupposition is an important component of the overall message in advertising and plays an irreplaceable part in fulfilling the ultimate purposes of advertising. Some scholars choose one of the pragmatic notions -- presupposition as the entering point to the studies of advertising language. Their studies lay good foundation for this thesis. This thesis gives a tentative analysis of pragmatic presupposition in advertising language by referring to the historical background and theoretical background of the study of presupposition.Due to the complex relations between presupposition and advertising language, the author analyze the values that pragmatic presupposition has in advertising language from three macroscopic angles: Presupposition and the language of advertising, Presupposition and the discourse of advertising ,Presupposition and the information of advertising. The author attempts to explore the possible functions of presupposition in printing advertising language and to find out the positive roles played by presupposition in helping advertising achieve its persuasion goal. At the same time, the author hopes that the thesis may enrich the understanding of pragmatic presupposition and modify the existing studies of advertising language theoretically and help advertising copywriters design more attractive and more successful ads practically.