A Study Of Pragmatic Strategies In English Advertising

As a variety of the human language community, advertising language is a persuasive exploitation of linguistic constituents with the ultimate goal of sales promotion or behavior manipulation. Pragmatic strategy refers to a long-term or situational plan of language use designed to achieve a particular communicative goal through a strategic configuration of resources and principles within the pragmatic realm. From this sense, all advertisements are goal-oriented and strategic.Advertising is also a social cognitive interaction between the advertiser and the reader/consumer. In both processes, language, as the medium for persuasion and cognition, plays a vital role in this psychological cognitive process to achieve the desired effectiveness. As a common practice, pragmatic strategies are commonly applied in all sorts of advertisements. The purposeful utilization of pragmatic strategies in advertising language can effectively impose an influence on or guidance to the reader/consumer to get the intended information, which in turn ensures the successful persuasion of buying.Based on the qualitative analysis of the data, the research is both data-driven and theory-driven. The conceptual framework is mainly constructed on the basis of psychological model of advertising persuasion, supplemented by Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory (RT) and general pragmatic theories. The investigation concentrates on the mechanisms in construction and transmission of persuasive intentions in English advertisements from the perspective of cognitive psychology and cognitive pragmatics. The present study, therefore, tries to scrutinize the role of pragmatic strategies in the manipulations of psychological effects with the help of pragmatic relevance from the cognition, emotion and action aspects of advertisement respectively.