A Study On Conversational Implicature In English Advertising Language

Nowadays, with highly developed commercial economy, advertisements, as a means of information transmission and sales promotion have penetrated every nook and cranny of people's modern life. Advertisers make use of all kinds of techniques to attract consumers'attention and to make them consume so that they can make profit, which requires that advertisements should be persuasive. Apart from the aids of sounds and pictures, the language of advertisements is the main means for the persuasiveness and effectiveness of advertisements. Many research works in this field have come out in succession, mainly discussing the fundamental features and functions of advertising English from perspectives of stylistics, discourse analysis, semiotics, etc. Actually, advertising language is a special conversation between advertisers and consumers. This paper aims to make an explication of the conversational implicatures of English advertising language which is famous for its attractive novelty and creativity by means of the Conversational Implicature theories and context theories. English advertising language with its uniqueness is playing an increasingly indispensable part in our modern life and society. Therefore, it's of great use to interpret conversational implicatures produced in English advertising language by means of the Conversational Implicature theories and context theories. It not only helps us to get clear understandings of what a certain advertisement is trying to convey so as to well distinguish those misleading and deceiving advertisements, but also contributes much to our deep considerations about the true lure and successful secrets of some popular advertisements.First, the author provides some fundamental knowledge of English advertising language in definition, classifications, functions and characteristics systematically, then expounds two theoretical points of view employed in this paper respectively-----the Conversational Implicature theories and context theories. The former is described from Cooperative Principles and Conversational Implicatures, while the latter mainly introduces context of situation, context of culture and context of cognition. After that, by setting English advertising examples, the author analyses the feature of advertising language and its effect from violating four maxims of CP. Then it explicates how to understand rich conversational implicatures of advertising language and its unique characteristics from context of situation, of culture and of cognition, while interpreting cases of English advertising language. In this way, the implied information behind the advertisements can be revealed. Then, on the basis of the above cases and analyses, the author concludes that the success of advertising language lies in advertisers'cleverly violating Cooperative Principle while taking consumers'psychology and different kinds of background information into consideration. Finally, the author provides some helpful suggestions from the advertisers'and consumers'angle respectively.