A Study On The Interpersonal Function Of Vagueness In The Advertising Language

Advertising language, as a sign of the commodity economic times, has received a lot of attention. It is always considered that the advertising language should be concise, prominent, precise; while as an effective way to propagate products, it also demonstrates another feature:vagueness. As an intrinsic feature of nature language, vagueness widely exists in nearly every discourse, let alone the advertisement discourse. Former scholars have done a lot of meaningful studies on the vagueness in the advertising language. This thesis tries to develop new thread on the basis of former studies and attempts to connect the vagueness in the advertising language with the interpersonal function.The interpersonal function is proposed by Halliday in his Systematic-Functional grammar. The interpersonal meta-function refers to the interactive relationship between the addressor and the addressee in an utterance situation, and the attitude the speaker or writer to his words or works. Halliday claims that the realization means of the interpersonal function are mood, modality and key. Later he adds some other means, such as:the person system, the attitudinal epithet, the connotation meaning of some words, etc. It is an extension to the study of the interpersonal meaning. Many other scholars also devote themselves to the study of the interpersonal meaning. Thompson and Martin are two of them. They both emphasized evaluation-they hold that evaluation is an important way to realize the interpersonal function. As to scholars home, Li Zhanzi is a representative. She spends lots of time on the study of interpersonal meaning and puts forwards more realization means of the interpersonal function in the autobiographical genre and suggests that the interpersonal meaning should be considered through three aspects:epistemic, evaluative and interactive. The thesis just draws on this expanded interpersonal framework and probes the interpersonal meaning of vagueness in the advertising language.To ensure the validity and credibility of the study, the thesis collects abundant samples in latest magazines so as to reflect the writing rules of modern advertisements. On the basis of them and the definition of vagueness, the thesis analyses more than 10 sorts of realization means of vagueness, and further investigates their interpersonal meaning respectively. It is expected that this analysis could provide a new perspective to the study on vagueness of advertising language.