A Study On Presupposition In English Consumer Advertisements

Advertisement has become indispensable and plays a very important role in modern society. We can not imagine the world without advertising. Advertisement tries to be persuasive—to win converts to a product, service, or idea. For each advertisement, language is all along the main carrier of messages. Due to the great importance of advertising in modern society, scholars have been studying the language in advertisement from many different aspects. To examine it from the perspective of presupposition, which is an important topic in semantics and pragmatics, is a new approach in recent years. Studies on presupposition and advertising are used as the theoretical background of the research. Thirty-five copies of English consumer advertisements are collected for corpus study, mainly from print media—English newspapers, magazines and internet. The present study is an effort to explore the employment of presupposition and the distribution of different presupposition types in English consumer advertisement.It is found that presupposition exists in 28 copies of consumer advertisements, which amounts to as high as 80%. Presupposition thus is a fairly common phenomenon in consumer advertising. This is inseparable from many important functions that presupposition serves in consumer advertisement: presupposition makes advertising language more concise, adds interestingness to advertising language, increases information amount of advertisement, ensures efficiency of advertising information communication, and enhances duplicity and inductivity of advertisement.Based on a linguistic classification, there are existential, factive, non-factive, lexical, state, belief and action presuppositions. The results of the study show that existential presupposition accounts for the largest proportion among the seven types. Eight out of the 28 copies of advertisements,accounting for 28.6%, employ existential presupposition. The main reasons are that triggers of existential presupposition—definite descriptions are found to be very common in English, and that existential presupposition serves many basic functions in consumer advertisement. The employment of existential presupposition contributes to the brevity of advertising language, increases advertising information amount, and may lead to the duplicity and inductivity of consumer advertisement.Based on advertising appeals, presupposition can be classified into emotional presupposition and rational presupposition. It is found that emotional presupposition amounts to a higher percentage. Seventeen out of the 28 copies of advertisements, constituting 60.7%, employ emotional presupposition. The main reasons are that consumers have many emotional needs to be satisfied, and that advertisements that touch people's emotions with their messages have greater chances to be remembered.The research is only an attempt to explore the use of presupposition and the distribution of different presupposition types in English consumer advertisement. It is hoped that the thesis could enrich the understanding of presupposition phenomenon in advertising language.