A Study Of The Conversational Implicatures Of Iconic Advertising Language

Language is of great importance in human communication, which is wellreflected in advertising. As one of the most important element of advertisingcommunication, advertising language can be considered as the soul of advertisement,which has attracted great interests of many scholars all over the world. They havedone a lot of studies on advertising language from many perspectives such aslinguistics, pragmatics, stylistics and so on. On the basis of previous researches, thisthesis is intended to present a research on the iconic advertising language within theframework of the theories of conversational implicature.Iconicity theory, a significant theory of cognitive linguistics, claims that theform (signifier) of a linguistic sign has some intrinsic association with its meaning(signified). Many scholars have discussed a lot about the definitions, features andtaxonomies of iconicity, constantly contributing a lot to the enrichment anddevelopment of this theory. Based on these researches, this thesis explores theiconicity widely employed in advertising language. It is found that imagic iconicity,diagrammatical iconicity and metaphorical iconicity are realized in many ways inadvertisements, and the application of these three widely accepted categories oficonicity makes advertising language humorous, vivid and persuasive.Since iconicity reflects the motivated relation between the signifier and thesignified of a sign and the signified or the conversational implicature is alwaysrelated to language users, study of iconic language within the framework ofpragmatics is necessary. Therefore, this thesis tries to study how conversationalimplicatures are generated in iconic advertising language within the framework ofGrice’s classic theory of conversational implicature and New-Gricen theories ofconversational implicature such as Levinson’s three conversational principles andSperber&Wilson’s relevance Theory. It is found that particularized implicatures aregenerated by violating Grice’s CP maxims, and effectively inferred on the basis ofLevinson’s three principles, say, Q-principle, I-principle, and M-principle, and well interpreted on the basis of Relevance Theory.To sum up, this thesis, on the one hand, provides some enlightenment to bothadvertisers and readers, that is, advertisement makers can make more persuasiveadvertisements while readers can understand advertising language better; on theother hand, it enriches and widens theoretical study of iconicity. As for furtherstudies on similar topic, more data can be used to make the study more convincing.Moreover, more research methods such as statistics can be adopted and moreperspectives such as psychology can be taken to deepen the study.