Cognitive Pragmatic Ambiguity And Its Application In Advertising

Ambiguity is a very common phenomenon in any natural language. On the basis of various linguistic theories, ambiguity researchers, starting from different perspectives, have made a lot of explorations at different levels of language. So far, the majority of such researches are done at the levels of speech sounds, grammar, and semantics. Consequently, they belong to a static research.The advancement of pragmatic theories has broken a new path to the dynamic study of ambiguity at a higher level. From the pragmatic point of view, ambiguity research can be divided into four types: syntagmatic, paradigmatic, overt and covert. Generally speaking, a pragmatically ambiguous structure allows more than one interpretation. That is to say, pragmatic ambiguity is characterized by polysemy. The clearing up of ambiguity depends greatly on contexts, and therefore pragmatic ambiguity is context-dependent.The study of language from a cognitive angle helps people to better understand how utterances are created to answer the purpose of communication, and how people come to know the entire world with the tool of language. The cognitive mode of study enables us to find the key to pragmatic ambiguity. Sperber and Wilson, founders of the theory of cognitive contexts, define the notion of"context"as"a psychological construct, a subset of the hearer's assumptions about the world. They argue that it is these assumptions rather than the actual state of the world that affects the interpretation of an utterance."(1995)In real language communication, what plays the predominant role turns out to be such assumptions that construct hearer's cognitive contexts. These assumptions come partly from communicators'direct experiences from the real-life world, but mostly from the cognitive environment, which"takes into account the various external factors but places the emphasis on the information provided by the world and hearers'mental availability for the interpretation process."(Cutt 1991) In a word, the theory of cognitive contexts takes into consideration the external environmental factors related to communicators as well as the knowledge structure stored in human brain. Cognitive context is systematically classified by another researcher Xiong Xueliang into three cognitive categories, i.e., situational knowledge, linguistic context knowledge and background knowledge. Such a classification contributes a lot to the study of pragmatic ambiguity.Pragmatic ambiguity can appear in different varieties of English, among which, English for advertising is a field with a lot of relevant questions open to exploration. Compared with other varieties of English, English for advertising is both terse and succinct, usually with a relevant cognitive context designed in it so as to draw its readers'attention and provide them with much room for imagination. To achieve such a goal, pragmatic ambiguity is often employed byadvertisement designers. This dissertation, with its first half devoted to a general exploration of cognitive pragmatic ambiguity, elucidates, with its second half, the formation and employment of pragmatic ambiguity in advertising from the cognitive point of view.This dissertation holds that the formation of pragmatic ambiguity in advertising results from the selection of cognitive contexts. Such selections are of crucial importance to the formation of the mechanism for pragmatic ambiguity. The mechanism falls into two major categories: generalized selection of cognitive contexts and individualized selection of cognitive contexts. The few factors that influence the first kind of selection include cognitive context information vacancy, cognitive context socio-psychological representation, and cognitive context selection by mistake. All these factors may lead to the occurrence of pragmatic ambiguity, which, in turn, results from the cognitive context given to readers. The factors that influence the second kind of selection, namely, the selection based on the subjectivity of advertisement readers, include the occurrence frequency of certain knowledge point in communicators'cognitive structure and different cognitive competences due to the diversity of communicators'age, knowledge and other specialties.If used appropriately, pragmatic ambiguity in advertising can produce positive effects both on consumers'mentality and their actual life. In addition, it will bring about favorable pragmatic values, such as humorous effect in communication and aesthetic contentment on the part of consumers, thereby fulfilling the purpose of advertising.