A Study On Presupposition Triggers In Chinese Cosmetic Advertising Language

Nowadays, advertisement has become an indispensable component of communication in modern society. Advertising language as a kind of persuasive language is the most important communicative factor,in advertisements. Through transferring information of the recommended products and beliefs or concepts of certain services, the ultimate purpose of advertising language is to persuade the potential consumers to accept the information or beliefs of the products, and then take some actions to purchase the products. In order to achieve this aim, advertisers often take various strategies to make advertising language more attractive, among which the application of presupposition is becoming popular these years.Presupposition is the phenomenon that there exists a common ground between the speaker and the hearer when they communicate with each other. In1892, it was firstly proposed by German philosopher Frege in the field of philosophy. Until to1960s, presupposition as an important concept is introduced to linguistics field. With the further study of presupposition, linguists discover that presuppositions are associated with some unique words or sentence structures. That is to say, some special words or sentence structures can trigger presupposition, and these words or sentence structures are defined as presupposition triggers. Presupposition triggers play a critical role in presupposition assertions. Scholars at home and abroad have classified presupposition triggers into different types, among which Levinson's thirteen types'classification is the most popular one. Based on the predecessors'classification, the author will reclassify the presupposition triggers into three levels:lexical level, syntactic level and phonological level.This thesis attempts to analyze the applications of presupposition triggers in Chinese cosmetic advertising language from three level model─lexical level, syntactic level and phonological level. And it also probes into the informative functions and language functions these presupposition triggers play in advertising language. Through the analysis of presupposition triggers in advertising language and summary of functions of these presupposition triggers, it can be found that among the three-level presupposition triggers, lexical level presupposition triggers are used at the most frequency, and syntactic presupposition triggers and phonological presupposition triggers are not adopted as frequent as lexical level presupposition triggers. Then, presupposition triggers used in advertising language can enlarge the information of advertising language and change the information focus of advertising language. And it also can make advertising language concise and diverse. The aims of this thesis are to enlighten advertisers to create more attractive advertisements by using presupposition triggers properly in advertising language, and to make consumers understand the presupposition meaning easily as well. What's more, the practical study on presupposition triggers in typical genre and a tentative reclassification of presupposition triggers will do help to enrich presupposition triggers and enlighten the further classification of presupposition triggers.