A Pragmatic Interpretation Of Politeness Strategies In Advertising Discourse

From 1980s,there has been an enormous upsurge of interest in the study of advertising discourse.It has been explored from the linguistic,semiotic, communication and pragmatic approaches.However,the politeness strategies in advertising discourse still have much room to explore,though it has been referred in the previous studies.According to Brown and Levinson's politeness strategies, advertising discourse can be divided into four types:agitating,ingratiating,deferential and implicit.Besides the classification,the present thesis further pragmatically explores the distribution,ways of politeness strategies realization and functions of each type of the advertising discourse based on 100 English advertising texts from the Time and New York Times.The result shows that among the four types,the most frequently used one is the ingratiating advertising discourse(53.26%).Its major function is social accelerator to "come closer" to the consumer.The less frequently used two are the deferential and the agitating advertising discourse(23.40%and 13.83%).The function of the deferential advertising is the lubricating oil to minimize the imposition and redress the potential face threats.Different from the above-mentioned two types,the agitating advertising discourse usually carries the forms of "imperative","declarative" or "exclamatory",expressing its purpose explicitly and directly.The implicit advertising discourse is the least frequently used one(8.51%).It puts words to mean more than what meets the ear and realizes by applying figures of speech and conversational implicatures.In the writing of advertisements,choosing suitable advertising discourse could help people of different cultural backgrounds understand and accept it.In theory,the classification of advertising discourse,which is established on the ground of politeness strategies,can also provide a way to explore the other areas' politeness research.