On The Non-observance Of Cooperative Principle In Advertising Language

As a means of information transmission, advertising in one form or another has been around for thousands of years. Today it is so pervasive and powerful that it has become an integral part of our daily life. The language of advertising, compared with the aids of sounds and pictures, is of decisive importance to the persuasiveness and effectiveness of advertisements. Ever since Geoffrey Leech pioneered the linguistic analysis of advertising language, many scholars have done rewarding research from the perspectives of sociolinguistics, cross-cultural studies, stylistics, pragmatics and so on. However, it is found that few efforts have been made on the systematic analysis of advertising language within the framework of Cooperative Principle and Linguistic Adaptation Theory, which have proved to be of great influence on the development of pragmatics.This thesis takes Cooperative Principle and Linguistic Adaptation Theory as the theoretical foundations, and adopts a qualitative case analysis to investigate and interpret the magazine advertising language. Based on the preliminary investigation on many magazine advertisements, the author finds that Cooperative Principle is frequently violated in advertising, which leads to the hypothesis that the advertiser prefers the communicative strategy, non-observance of Cooperative Principle for the sake of contextual adaptation and sales promotion.By analyzing authentic advertisements from mass circulated English magazines published in recent years, the author probes into the ways of the non-observance of Cooperative Principle as a promoting strategy. Linguistic Adaptation Theory gives detailed explanations for the violation of each maxim of Cooperative Principle. Further discussion is carried out on the explanatory power of Linguistic Adaptation Theory and some pragmatic features of print advertising language are generated. Within the scope of this study, the hypothesis has been proved.