A Study Of Pragmatic Presupposition In The Language Of Chinese And English Infant Product Advertisements

Pragmatic presupposition is a common linguistic phenomenon and it is closely linked with contextual factors. In advertising language, pragmatic presupposition is one of the most frequently used language skills.The present paper conducts a study on PPs (short for the pragmatic presuppositions in Chinese and English IPAs (short for infant product advertisements) for exploring the PP’s functions in IPAs. The infants are zero to three years old babies. Among the corpus of this paper,50 Chinese samples are from famous domestic mother & baby magazines and various brands’ official websites in Chinese; while 20 English samples are derived from an American online shopping site named Diapers (http://www.diapers.com/).Three points come from the present research as follows.1. PP plays an important role in both Chinese and English IPAs. Factive presupposition, belief presupposition, stative presupposition, behavior presupposition and cultural presupposition are frequently used PPs in both Chinese and English IPAs. IPAs employ various kinds of PPs to realize the advertisements’ persuasive function thus to influence consumers’ purchasing decisions. Based on the previous studies, the author finds something new by studying PPs in IPAs. For example, the stative presuppositions used in IPAs can be classified into three types:the possible threatening state, the favorable state during the process and the perfect state after using certain product. This finding is partly accordance with Chen Xinren’s conclusions on stative presupposition in advertisements:the undesirable state before and the desirable state after using the advertised products. Such findings reveal the fact that IPA has its own features and the features affect the PP’s information as well as usages.2. Because of the similarities in advertised products, pragmatic presuppositions in Chinese and English IPAs have a lot in common. Meanwhile, because of the diversity of social lives, customs and cultures, Chinese IPAs and English IPAs have several differences. Through detailed case analysis and a contractive study, author summarizes common points and probes into differences. For example, the belief presuppositions in Chinese IPAs reveal the typical Chinese high expectations for children. These findings reflect the similarities and differences between Chinese culture and English culture, especially in the child rearing. In a word, Chinese and English advertisers have made full use of PPs to create more strategic and persuasive advertisements. In IPAs, PPs are well designed in both content and form for having a positive influence on the sales promotion of infant products.3. Affected by the people’s subjectivity, different people will have different interpretations of a pragmatic presupposition. Cultural background and individual subjectivity are two important factors in the process of interpreting PP.