A Study On Presupposition Triggers In English Cosmetic Advertising Language

Advertising, as an effective means to spread commercial information, has become an important part of communication in modern society. Advertising language is a kind of persuasive language, and its ultimate goal is to persuade the potential consumers to purchase products or services through transferring information of the recommended products and beliefs or concepts of certain services. Presupposition trigger in advertising language can be regarded as a pragmatic strategy for the advertisers to achieve their specific purposes. Thus, it is really significant to study presupposition trigger in advertisements.The author of this paper probes into presupposition trigger in English cosmetic advertisements from the perspectives of pragmatics and contextual adaptation theory. The research questions are put forward as follows:(1) What are the types and frequency of presupposition trigger used in English cosmetic advertising language?(2) With the support of Contextual Adaptation Theory, how do presupposition triggers adapt to different contextual factors?(3) What are the functions of these presupposition triggers in English cosmetic advertising language?The corpus of 120 pieces of advertisements in this paper is selected from the fashion magazines of Marie Claire, Vogue, Elle and Cosmopolitan dated from July, 2013 to July 2014. The author used qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis to conduct the research. The major findings are as follows:(1) There are altogether fourteen kinds of presupposition triggers frequently used in English cosmetic advertisements through the analysis of presupposition triggers at lexical level, syntactic level and phonological level. The author finds that the definite descriptions appear in the highest frequency at lexical level, at the same time, the type of presupposition trigger at syntactic level that appears most frequently is the question.(2) Based on Verschueren?s contextual adaptation theory, presupposition trigger in advertising language, as a kind of communication strategy, is a form of language choice with higher level of consciousness. Meanwhile, the choice and use of presupposition trigger is a dynamic process with higher complication. In order to conduct the adaptation, advertisers choose and use presupposition trigger to achieve or reach a specific advertising purpose. In the specific process of using presupposition trigger, the adaptation object of advertisers includes physical world, social world and the mental world.(3) Presupposition triggers in the advertising language have such functions as: enlarging the advertising information, making the advertising language more concise and economical, more interesting and more euphemistic.From the theoretical perspective, this research not only expands the research scope of the presupposition trigger theory, but also contributes greatly to the research of presupposition trigger used in English cosmetic advertisement. From the practical perspective, it can not only inspire consumers to have a better understanding of the English cosmetic advertisements with presupposition triggers, but also help advertisers to design more attractive and persuasive advertisements by using presupposition triggers skillfully.