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

Vagueness is the natural attribute of language, existing in advertisements, a special type of language. Up to now, there is no agreed definition of vagueness. While, vagueness in this thesis particularly refers to the deliberate use of ambiguous or implicit expressions in order to achieve certain communicative goals. The Linguistic Adaptation Theory is propounded by Verschueren, which holds the idea that language use is the continuous making of linguistic choices, consciously or unconsciously, for language internal and/or language external reasons. The reason why language users make proper linguistic choices is that language has three properties: variability, negotiability and adaptability. Adaptability mainly refers to the adaptation to language users’ mental world, social wlord and physical world.Based on this theory, this thesis points out that the process of using vagueness in both Chinese and English advertisements is advertisers’ conscious making of linguistic choices,for language internal and language external reasons. Whether the advertisers could persuade consumers to purchase or not depends on the realization of the contextual adaptation.This thesis consists of six chapters. The first chapter is the introduction and the second chapter is the literature reviews of advertising and vagueness. The third chapter is the introduction to the Adaptation Theory. And the next chapter thoroughly analyzes the realization of vagueness demonstrated in food advertisements at different linguistic levels and then summarizes some pragmatic functions of vagueness in food advertisements. The fifth chapter analyzes the adaptability of vagueness in food advertisements by using the Adaptation Theory, and the last chapter concludes the major findings and suggestions for further study.Through the analysis, it could be found that: 1) pragmatic vagueness, as a communicative strategy, often occurs in food advertisements and it can be realized from three levels: sound level, lexical level and syntactic level; 2) the use of vagueness in food advertisements aims at adapting to consumers’ mental world(adapting to consumers’ needs for credibility, nutrition, flavor, personality and fashion, and social status) and social world(adapting to social conventions and social cultures). Based on the analysis, this thesis attempts to shed light on consumers’ interpretation and advertisers’ designing of advertisements.