A Pragmatic Analysis Of Fuzziness In Advertising Language

Advertisements are nowadays seen almost everywhere. Although advertisements tend to be displayed in various forms so as to stimulate people's sense organs and therefore arouse their interests in the products or services, advertising language still plays a key role in the process of promotion. Many copywriters adopt fuzziness to enhance the advertising effects; hence the study on fuzziness in advertising language gradually attracts the attentions of the scholars. The present research attempts to analyze fuzziness involved in Chinese and English advertising language in pragmatic way.This research is going to analyze fuzziness in advertising utterances with the pragmatic theories of the Cooperative Principle and the Politeness Principle, applying qualitative as well as quantitative methods together with case studies and comparisons. It collects 60 advertisements which involve fuzziness in both English and Chinese, thirty in Chinese and thirty in English. All these sixty advertisements are commercial ones as the advertising language in the Public Service Advertisements tends to be precise and accurate. The commercial advertisements such as clothes,food and beverages, online shopping and daily necessities are chosen in this research, as these are indispensable in people's life. This research aims to find out the differences as well as connections between fuzziness in Chinese and English advertising language so as to know more about the cultural differences as well as connections between China and Western countries; It also makes some comparisons between the frequencies and distributions of fuzziness in terms of violating the Cooperative Principle; pragmatic effects realized by fuzziness in advertising language are probed into as well.There are altogether five chapters which constitute the whole thesis.Chapter one is an introduction of the thesis. Chapter two is a comprehensive literature review of previous studies on fuzziness at home and abroad as well as fuzziness in advertising language. Chapter three mainly illustrates the theoretical framework of the whole thesis and the methodology of the research. Chapter four is the most significant part of the thesis, which is a detailed analysis of fuzziness in advertising language applying the Cooperative Principle (CP) and the Politeness Principle (PP) and the effects of fuzziness in advertising language.Chapter five draws a conclusion of the whole thesis.Through the analysis and calculation of the author, it is found that:First, the similarities of fuzziness in Chinese and English advertising utterances outweigh the differences, which implies to some extent that Chinese and Western cultures tend to intermingle while keeping some of their separate identities at the same time. Second, fuzziness is frequently adopted by the copywriters in their advertising utterances and most of the fuzzy utterances are caused by the Quantity Maxim as well as Manner Maxim, which respectively occupy 61.67% and 76.67% of the whole percentage. Third, although fuzziness in advertising language causes some negative effects even legal disputes, the positive effects of it are well worth studying.This research not only contributes to the study of fuzziness in advertising language in the theoretical way, but also illustrates the practical effects of fuzziness involved in advertising utterances. In addition, the cultural differences as well as connections between China and Western countries are explored. This thesis is able to help guide the copywriters to use fuzziness in their own advertisements more properly and the potential consumers to know better about the advertising skills hence to abstract useful information from various advertising utterances and finally make a wise decision.