A Pragmatic Study Of Questions In Advertising

With the rapid development of commodity economy, advertising is almost everywhere, which plays an important role in daily life. Hence, people pay more and more attention to advertising language. Besides catching the addressees'eyes, advertising language attempts to create an ideal publicity atmosphere, stimulate the addressees'desire for consuming a product or service, so as to achieve the most favorable effect on communication. Among the western linguists, Leech first studies the stylistic features of advertising language systematically. Ever since him, many scholars probe into advertising language from the perspectives of sociolinguistics,stylistics,pragmatics,cross-cultural communication etc. However, one common phenomenon in advertising language hasn't aroused people's proper attention. That is questions in advertising. It is well known that the ultimate goal of commercial advertising is to promote a product or service. In order to attain the goal, the advertisers are to persuade the addressees, making them believe that if they consume a product or service, they will gain the benefits as being advertised. There are two kinds of persuasion: direct and indirect. The former one, however, may give an imposing impression to the addressees, hence, easily arousing offensive feelings. The latter is euphemistic and always gives face to the addressees. Therefore, it is more likely to be accepted. Questions in advertising belong to the latter type. It is hypothesized that questions in advertising are not only a linguistic device, but also a persuasive device to promote sales. The thesis is divided into three parts. The first part is an introduction, which consists of Chapter One and Chapter Two. Chapter One generalizes the content and significance of the study. Chapter Two is a general review of the study on questions, and analyzes the characteristics and types of questions in advertising. The second part is the main body of the thesis, consisting of Chapter Three,Chapter Four and Chapter Five. It analyzes the questions in advertising from the perspectives of the CP (Cooperative Principle),the PP (Politeness Principle) and presupposition respectively. The last part is a conclusion, consisting of Chapter Six. Based on the discussions, the following conclusions are drawn: 1) Questions in advertising is not only a linguistic device, but also a persuasive device to promote sales; 2) Besides interrogative syntagma, questions in advertising possess their own characteristics. They have no fixed questioners, i.e. the questioner can be the advertiser,the consumer or the copywriter who speaks in the position of the consumer. They are one-way communication to some extent. In addition, they perform a variety of pragmatic functions, such as making suggestion, expressing exclamation, and so on; 3) According to the questioner's intention, possible and corresponding answers, and the conveyed meanings, questions in advertising can be roughly divided into 9 types: information-seeking questions, rhetorical questions, questions for suggesting, questions for choosing, questions for conforming, questions for reminding, questions for exclaiming, questions for offering and questions for answering on one's own; 4) The CP is applied to the inference of the implied meaning of the questions in advertising for the sake of persuasion and sales promotion; 5) Under most circumstances, questions in advertising follow the maxims except the maxim of modesty in the PP to promote a product or service; 6) The advertisers can make use of presuppositions in questions to imply a deceptive claim to affect the addressees'purchase behavior.