| It is generally believed that advertising language is persuasive. Linguistic studies on advertising language and/or its persuasiveness have been conducted mainly from the perspectives of semiotics, stylistics, sociolinguistics and pragmatics. In the field of pragmatics, although many efforts have been made on systematic analyses of the relationship between advertising language and the Cooperative Principle (or CP) put forward by Grice (1975), there is a lack of principled reasoning under the CP to draw out the conversational implicatures in advertisements (or ads).This paper takes the CP as the theoretical foundation and investigates how advertising language is interpreted using the General Program for Conversational Implicature (or GPCI) proposed by Zhang Renxian (2005). Case study of authentic ads written in English is conducted to probe into the principled way ads are interpreted for conversational implicatures. Detailed explanations are given as to the violation of each conversational maxim under the CP.On the one hand, this paper proves the feasibility and efficiency of the GPCI in the analysis of advertising language. It arrives at a specific formulation of the working out of conversational implicatures in the specific context of slogans, which can be seen as a contribution to Grice's theory of conversational implicatures. On the other, this paper can be of assistance to advertisers when they are writing copies for ads. |
