Vagueness Of Commercial Advertising Language From The Cognitive Perspective

In modern society, advertising is ubiquitous and has become a very important part of people's life. Roughly, advertising can be classified into two types:advertising in a broad sense and advertising in a narrow sense. The former includes commercial advertising and non-commercial advertising, while the latter specifically refers to commercial advertising. In this thesis, commercial advertising would be discussed in particular.It is important to study advertising, on which researches are inseparable from the study of its language. Therefore, with advertising omnipresent in society, it has attracted more and more linguists to study its main carrier: advertising language. The ultimate aim of advertising is to persuade people to make purchases, which determines its language features and distinguishes its style from others. Thus it is worthwhile to study the language of advertising in the linguistic field.Advertising requires a certain form of language to represent. But whatever form of the expression it is, its carrying tools are inseparable from language. For decades of years, the study of language has always focused on accuracy and neglected vagueness. Vagueness (this thesis prefers the term of vagueness since it has a much wider range than fuzziness) is the objective property of natural language, and plays a vital role in the use of natural language as well as its precision. As a special form of language, the language of advertising is inevitably vague. As a matter of fact, just because of its vagueness, it has gradually shown its superiority on the spread. Then, in daily life, how people generate and understand vagueness of advertising language by cognitive mechanisms and what is the cognitive rule are worthwhile to analyze.Former researchers have contributed a lot to the study of advertising language, mostly concerning the linguistic or rhetorical features and its cultural aspect. And among the researches, some have explained advertising language from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, but there is no study on the laws of the usage of advertising language with the prototype theory. The prototype theory (PT) is the hottest topic of cognitive linguistics, which is a newly emerged linguistic school or research approach in the linguistic field since the 1960s. The main views of the prototype theory are in the following:the world consists of categories; members of a category are not defined by a set of sufficient and necessary conditions; members bear the resemblance but not with the equal status, having the prototype and the non-prototype in a category; not all properties are binary; the boundaries between categories are vague. The main contribution of the prototype theory is that it focuses its attention on the internal structure of the category and the fact that a category has "core" and "edge". The prototype theory holds that categorization is one of the most fundamental human cognitive activities. The proposition of the prototype theory provides the cognitive basis to explain vagueness. So this thesis holds that it is suitable and meaningful to explain vagueness of advertising language with the prototype theory.Therefore, this thesis intends to analyze vagueness of commercial advertising language from the cognitive perspective---the prototype theory. Chapter one is a general description, which pointes out orientation, rationale, methodology and significance, and theoretical framework and overall structure; chapter two is brief reviews of commercial advertising and vagueness of language and the relevant literature of the theoretical framework; chapter three is the detail discussion of the theoretical framework---the prototype theory; chapter four is the comprehensive exposition of vagueness of commercial advertising language; chapter five is the analysis of vagueness of commercial advertising language with the prototype theory, which explains how people generate and understand vagueness of commercial advertising language through the cognitive mechanism; the final chapter is the conclusion in which limitations and suggestions are pointed out. This thesis hopes to provide the future study of advertising language with a new perspective, and offer a reference for the study of vagueness of commercial advertising language and the application of the prototype theory in future.