A Pragmatic Study Of Vague Language In Commercial Advertising

Vagueness is one of the fundamental attributes of natural language. It is a subject of increasing interest, and both foreign and domestic studies have achieved success in vague language. Nevertheless, the study on the application of vague language in the context of English commercial advertising is relatively sparse. Advertising has penetrated almost all aspects of life to which it has become indispensable. As a means to channel information,advertising makes use of mass media to communicate information to the public.Advertisers are inclined to utilize all kinds of approaches to attract people's attention and convince them to buy their goods or services. In order to publicize services and products,advertisers seem to adopt different strategies in order to guarantee the effectiveness of advertisements. In this vein, the use of vague expressions in advertising seems to be quite an effective strategy. This emanates from its claimed strong persuasive power, as it can make advertising language more natural, more flexible, more polite and more effective.There are three research questions in this thesis: How are vague language used in commercial advertising? What are the major motivations behind the use of vague language in commercial advertising? What are the major pragmatic functions of vague language in commercial advertising? Through a collective data, vague language in advertising is edited purposely from phonetic level, lexical level, and syntactic level.Through the analysis of vagueness in advertisements under a pragmatic framework namely, Grice's Cooperative Principle, Leech's Politeness Theory, Verschueren's Adaption theory and Critical Pragmatics, this thesis endeavors to illustrates consuming motivations behind the use of vague language and vague language which plays both positive and negative roles in commercial advertising. As to the consuming motivations,the use of vague language can achieve a sense of High-technology, authority, novelty and convenience. Of course, some consumers would like to go along with the crowd in the consumptive arena. Vague language in advertising have an influence on consumers'psychologies and their choices. As to its pragmatic functions, its positive functions include improving the flexibility of advertising, making advertisements more politely,enriching the message of ideas, improving the appropriateness of advertising, and promoting objectivity and credibility. Its negative functions cover misleading consumers and making them subject to false understanding.