A Study Of Pragmatic Vagueness In English Advertisements From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Nowadays, advertising has infiltrated in every corner of our social life. Therefore,researches on advertising have been carried out from various perspectives. This thesisfocuses on the pragmatic application of vague language in English advertisementsguided by Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory. Pragmatic vagueness as acommunicative strategy is carried out by the manipulation of linguistic devices toachieve certain communicative goals. This thesis is a qualitative study, and the datamainly collected from printed commercial advertisements, such as newspapers,magazines, etc. The main purpose of this study is to better direct both copywriter’sadvertisement designing and consumer’s advertisement-interpretation.Pragmatic vagueness, as a communicative strategy, is frequently exploited bycopywriters in advertising to fulfill certain communicative goals. Thus, manylinguistic devices which can activate pragmatic vagueness are manipulated bycopywriters to perform this function. A scrutiny of the collected data reveals thatpragmatic vagueness can be activated from phonetic level, lexical level, and syntacticlevel. Punning is the main device at the phonetic level. At the lexical level, hedges,descriptive adjectives, comparatives, superlatives and frequency words are the mainways to activate pragmatic vagueness in advertising. At syntactical level, ellipsis andindirect speech acts are exploited to achieve the effects. Besides, the pragmaticvagueness is employed to adapt to the non-linguistic contextual correlates, whichencompass the audience’s needs for security, needs of gaining love, and esteem need.Pragmatic vagueness also is employed to adapt to the social conventions, culturalfactors and physical settings.After the analysis of how and why pragmatic vagueness is employed inadvertising, the specific functions of the application of vagueness language inadvertising are discussed. The study finds that if pragmatic vagueness is applied in anappropriate way, it can make the language more impressive and persuasive, promoteobjectivity and credibility, enhance flexibility of advertising, improve the appropriateness of advertisement, and achieve politeness. While if the pragmaticvagueness is employed in an inappropriate way, it will produce some negative effects.Pragmatic vagueness is an effective communicative strategy in advertising.Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory is very effective in explaining this linguisticphenomenon. Therefore, a research on pragmatic vagueness in advertising from theperspective of Adaptation Theory may have both theoretical and practical values.