Pragmatic Enrichment In English Advertisements From The Perspective Of Lexical Pragmatics

As an indispensable part of human life, advertisements have wildly penetrated into human’s daily life and left a huge impact on people’s life quality. To study this specific language phenomenon, many linguists have conducted their researches concerning English advertisements through various perspectives such as Semiotics, Stylistics, Pragmatics, Socio-linguistics and so on. The above researches suggest that relatively few scholars put their emphases of advertising studies on the pragmatic effects of lexical deviance and there are still some researching spaces for this field of study. Pragmatic enrichment is often regarded as a means to realize lexical deviance and is proposed by Wilson in 2003. Pragmatic enrichment means to construct a word’s dynamic meaning in communication through proper pragmatic broadening and narrowing process. Therefore, this paper mainly studies various subtypes of pragmatic enrichment in English advertisements from the perspective of lexical pragmatics in hope of providing some benefits to future studies on lexical pragmatics in English advertisements.The data analyzed in this paper mainly comes from books and the Internet. A statistic account of the common forms of pragmatic enrichment and their subtypes is conducted in the data collecting process with 300 English advertisements as the research samples. Based on the statistic results of these data, this paper employs typical examples to perform a detailed explanation towards pragmatic narrowing and broadening process and discusses the pragmatic effects of various subtypes of pragmatic enrichment in English advertisements.The study of this paper suggests:1) person deictic expressions in narrowing and category extension of brand names in broadening are the two major forms of pragmatic enrichment in English advertisements; 2)when interpreting the actual meaning of a word that triggers semantic deviance in English advertisements, a hearer needs to take four external factors namely advertising background, communicative intention, encyclopedic knowledge and logic sense into consideration and constructs a meaning that can achieve optimal relevance based on the word’s specified sense.3) pragmatic enrichment is widely employed in advertisements because it can generally arouse potential customer’s attention, generate their interests, cultivate purchasing desire and strengthen their memory.