An Analysis Of Pragmatic Ambiguity In English Advertisements

As a universal linguistic phenomenon, ambiguity is an inherent property of natural language and exists in every language and on every linguistic level, which has received worldwide attention and has been studied for years by scholars both home and abroad on the level of phonology, lexis, syntax and pragmatics as well since Plato.Another aspect of interest to us is advertising language. Advertising language in the present world has an abundant content and a rich pragmatic function. It acts as a reflection of culture and society. As a specific carrier of advertisements, it plays an important role in performing the goal of advertising. Scholars both home and broad have attached great attention to this linguistic phenomenon, and have contributed a lot to the field.It is true that scholars at home and abroad have been studying advertising language for many years. They have made an exhaustive analysis of advertising language at its lexical, stylistic, and discourse levels. Unfortunately, very little research has been done into advertising language from the angle of pragmatics, let alone a comprehensive study of advertising language from the perspective of pragmatics. Therefore, my task in this thesis, is to see whether we can fulfill the task by applying pragmatic approach to some linguistic features in advertising language that are hard to explain using other theories in order to reveal pragmatic ambiguity in advertising.From the perspective of pragmatics and based on the relevant theories of pragmatics and the various characteristics of advertising language, this dissertation deals with contrastive study of language from the aspects of theory and language resources, and attempts to make a more systematic study of the use of pragmatic ambiguity in advertisement, trying to decoding ambiguity which is closely related to concrete context and can not be well explained within semantic field.This kind of theoretical combination and factual analysis will undoubtedly cultivate our pragmatic competence, which will finally lead to the development of our improved language proficiency. What's more, knowing the characteristics of ambiguity and the ways of analyzing them will be of great help to the publicity of the product advertised, to the simulation of the audiences'purchasing desire and to the achievement of best appealing results. Research into such aspects as cultural factors, code-mixing, code-switching, economy principle and pragmatic failures not only does good to advertisers or manufacturers, but also helps ordinary people to attach more importance to language use.The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to make an observation of language use in the present society and to illustrate the achievement of a maximum economic efficiency via language use through analysis of language resources--advertising language. What's more, research in this aspect may serve as a basis for the further study of language development and promote the improvement of the economy and society. It is the author's great desire that the research done here should lead to a healthy development of advertising language and a strengthening of the construction of language, and finally do well to the development of politics, economy, and culture of the whole society.