A Study Of The Hedges In English Commercial Advertising Discourse

As an important means of communication, advertising has permeated every corner ofdaily life. The original characteristics of the advertising language are informative, accurateand persuasive, but with the increasingly fierce market competition and the development offuzzy linguistics, advertising language more and more manifests the characteristics offuzziness and persuasiveness. At present, hedges are widely used in advertising and becomemore popular. Using hedges in advertisements is not a lack of language skills; on the contrary,it is just a choice for language communication. It is a kind of business strategy. Whetheradvertising can be well understood by consumers so as to make consumes buy more productsreflects the utility of advertisements.At first, this paper using the research achievements of predecessors for reference,aggregates the studies of hedges, mainly analyzes the research status at home and abroad andseveral kinds of classification of hedges. Then it illustrates the existence motivations ofhedges in advertising from the angle of pragmatics. In the aspect of theory, this paper basedon the communication game theory-a theoretical framework of cognitive pragmatics toillustrate the utility maximization from two aspects of the authenticity utility andappropriateness utility, and apply the utilities of authenticity and appropriateness toadvertising language. The authenticity utility refers to the proposition utility, which expressesin whether advertising language is authentic and reliable, and whether can make theadvertisement audience correctly understand and arouse their purchase desires. Besides, thisutility also reflects in whether advertisers can avoid the responsibility for the falseadvertisement, while the appropriateness utility refers to the interpersonal effectiveness of theadvertising language. Advertisers use empathy ability to seize the advertisement audience’s psychology, which not only maintains the face of the audience, but also can arouse theirinterest and curiosity so as to make advertising exert its maximum utility.This paper cites some classic advertising, and analyzes the hedges in advertising basedon the utility, but the type of hedges is limited, because the research mostly involves fuzzywords; Secondly this paper discusses how hedges make advertising exert maximum utilityonly from the aspect of the utility of game, but not to build a concrete model to explain howadvertisers and advertising audiences to achieve a state of game equilibrium. Therefore, thispaper only carried through the preliminary research and exploration for hedges in advertisingfrom the perspective of communication theory, and revealed the necessity of hedges and howhedges exert the maximum utility in terms of authenticity utility and appropriateness utility.