A Study On Conversational Implicature In English Print FMCGs Advertising

Fast-moving consumer goods(FMCGs)are a type of goods consumed every day by the average consumer.The goods that comprise this category are ones that need to be replaced frequently compared to those that are usable for extended periods of time.In FMCGs advertising,the widely used conversational implicature plays a crucially important role in persuading consumers into purchasing.The author firstly selects 326 ads from Reader's Digest;People;Vogue;Cosmopolitan Women;Life;American Home;The Women's Own,then 150 are selected by Simple Random Sampling method.Through author's analysis,79 ads are ruled out due to their non-FMCGs nature.Among the remaining 71 FMCGs ads,according to the three linguistic data selecting criteria proposed by author,62 are picked up as linguistic data of this thesis.To comprehensively analyze conversational implicature in FMCGs advertising,this paper takes Grice's Cooperative Principle and Levinson's Q-,I-,M-principle as theoretical foundation with an aim to qualitatively explore the generation and inference of particularized conversational implicature and generalized conversational implicature in FMCGs ads.The author first presents a review of the historical background of the study on print advertising language,especially that of FMCGs,and theoretical basis of the two kinds of conversational implicatures whose similarities and differences in nature are revealed by analyzing their characteristics.Then,the author analyzes authentic examples to explore how particularized and generalized conversational implicatures are produced and inferred in the FMCGs advertising text to effectively help advertisers achieve their implied intention through what they have their advertisements say.Finally,the author further proves the important roles conversational implicature play in commercial advertising and concludes their three main functions.According to the study of in this thesis,some major findings are reached:1).Conversational implicatures are widely used in advertising context to increase attractiveness,creativeness and persuasiveness.2).There is a working mechanism for the generation and inference for Particularized Conversational Implicatures(PCIs),but that doesn't go for Generalized Conversational Implicatues(GCIs)which is derived from people's stereotypical knowledge.Besides,contrary to PCIs,not every type of GCIs can be found in advertising,which suggests a gap between advertising context and daily verbal exchange.3).Not all conversational implicatures are in favor of advertised product,advertiser should be very cautious about its application.As for the significance of this research,it mainly lies in following aspects:first of all,the thesis conducts a comprehensive analysis of conversational implicature,which to a certain degree will promote a better understanding of conversational implicature from a pragmatic perspective;secondly,the thesis probes into not only PCIs,but also applies GCIs to explore FMCGs advertising,which will further broaden the applied range of conversational implicature;thirdly,this thesis is hoped to be helpful to relative fields and provide references for further studies on conversational implicature.