An Analysis Of Pragmatic Vagueness In English Commercial Advertisements From The Perspective Of The Adaptation Theory

Advertising,as a kind of mass media that has gradually increased its impact in the society,has affected almost all areas of human social life.It is also a sort of communicative approach in which advertisers convey information to consumers.In the process of communication or transmitting information between advertisers and consumers,advertisers will take advantage of certain language features and strategies to achieve their ends.For instance,vagueness is often used in advertising language for the sake of some linguistic effects,such as informative,flexible,persuasive and so on.This article attempts to study the pragmatic vagueness of English commercial advertisements from a point view of Verschueren's adaptation theory.140 pieces of advertisements are collected from the official websites of some representative foreign magazines including The Saturday Evening Post,News Week,Automobile Magazine and Reader's Digest.All pieces of advertisements are used to establish a mini-corpora,that is,English Commercial Advertising Corpora(ECAC).Through a qualitative and quantitive study of English commercial advertising,major findings will be summarized by the author.Firstly,the pragmatic vagueness in English commercial advertising is mainly achieved through adjectives.And approximators are more frequently used than shields in English commercial advertising.Secondly,contextual correlates of adaptability are a very important way to realize pragmatic vagueness in English commercial advertising.Mental world,social world and physical world are three correlates in contextual adaptation.Thirdly,owing to pragmatic vagueness,the language of English commercial advertisements is more informative,flexible and persuasive.This thesis is hoped to offer some implications for the future study and practical life.Firstly,Verschueren's adaptation theory provides a new perspective for the analysis of vague language in English business advertisements.Secondly,this study can offer some enlightenment to advertisers and consumers in the real life.For advertisers,they can get some implications in creating more brilliant advertisements.And for consumers,if they have known some language features of advertisements,they can understand advertising better and establish a correct concept on shopping when they purchase goods instead of cheating by the false advertisement.