The Observance And Non-observance Of Cooperative Principle In English Advertising Language

Advertising, as being the important part of the social language, has directly affected people'sdaily life and work through many ways. And with the social development and economicprosperity, this influence will be extended. Advertising makes use of all kinds of techniques toattract the consumers' attention, stimulate their interest, and then finally get them into action.This essence decides advertising language must be persuasive.Advertising, as a form of communication, has also been an object for study. Scholars at homeand abroad have been studying advertising language from different perspectives, such aseconomics, psychology, sociology, as well as linguistics. For instance, Leech has given adetailed description of English advertisements from the aspect of speech sounds, phoneme,grammar and vocabulary. Keiko first used Relevance Theory and context to make asystematic analysis of English and Japanese advertisements. Huang Guowen has conducted astudy on advertising language, employing Halliday's Systematic Functional Grammar astheoretical basis, the result of which is both insightful and suggestive.This thesis explores the persuasiveness of the advertising language from the perspective ofpragmatic theories, explaining the flouts of Grice's Cooperative Principle, which lead to theproduction of implication consequently and further use the implicature theory to analyze thepersuasiveness of the advertising. The thesis also will further explore the factors that affectthe persuasiveness of advertising on the consumers' side. This pragmatic study limits its scopeof analysis to the print advertising in English magazines and a qualitative case study isadopted as the research method.