A Study On Hedges In English Advertising

With the development of modern society, advertisements, nowadays, have penetrated every corner of people's life. Accordingly, advertising language, an important carrier of information, also reveals its importance. In their efforts to promote their products or services, advertisers seek every means to make full use of the advertising language.Employing hedges in advertising proves to be an effective approach. The reason is that hedges can achieve the tasks of being persuasive and attractive, which make the essence of advertising language, and can also make the advertising language more natural, flexible, polite and effective. Hedge was a semantic concept when it was first put forward. The study of hedges from the perspective of pragmatics, with the deep study of vague language, becomes one of the most appealing topics in recent years.The author, in this thesis, thus attempts to associate hedges with the English advertising language with a view to presenting a deep understanding of hedges and elaborating their pragmatic functions. What's more, the author mainly focuses on the English commercial advertisements.This thesis starts with a general study of hedges and an introduction to English advertising, and then traces the factors of their existence in English advertising. These factors pave the way for pragmatic functions of hedges in English advertising. Different hedges on the basis of the Cooperative Principle and the Politeness Principle such as Quality Hedges, Quantity Hedges, Tact hedges etc. are fully illustrated with examples.Hedges possess many pragmatic features involving cancellability, indefiniteness, indirectness and markedness, which determine the rich pragmatic functions of hedges. In this thesis, pragmatic functions of hedges are mainly analyzed for the sake of cooperation and politeness including increasing flexibility of English advertising, achieving accuracy, strengthening the effect of the advertising language etc. Different hedges help to achieve the same pragmatic functions. And hedges of the same kind can realize different pragmatic functions as well. Meanwhile, the pragmatic functions of hedges in English advertising also fully convey the features of English advertising.Different hedges can effectively reflect the features of advertising and realize the pragmatic functions. The exploration of hedges in English advertising from pragmatic point of view promotes further study of them from different perspectives. More importantly, advertisers are able to fully appreciate hedges in advertising language so that they can employ hedges in a better way for promoting their products or services.