A Study Of Pragmatic Presupposition In Advertising Language

As consumers, we are all exposed to hundreds and maybe even thousands of commercial advertisements every day. Advertising is a type of communication, most advertisements are intended to be persuasive to win converts to a product or service. Advertising plays a very important role in modem economy and social life, advertising language is vital to the success of ads. In recent years, people pay more and more attention to advertising language. The frequently use of presupposition in advertising language can intensify the persuasiveness of advertising.In the present study, the author applies pragmatic presupposition as a basic theory, meanwhile touching on Cooperative Theory. This study is based on the combination of a qualitative study and a quantitative study. The analysis of the classification of five types of pragmatic presuppositions in advertising language belongs to a qualitative study. Besides, the author also makes a questionnaire to analyze the general situation of the use of pragmatic presuppositions in ads.The author also makes some researches about the realization of the Cooperative Principle in advertising language, including the situations of violation and observation of this principle. Then the author concludes that the deliberate violation of Cooperative Principle is also an observation of it.Previous studies on advertising language are mainly concerned with advertising words and their commercial purposes. From the perspective of pragmatic presupposition, the author collected 150 advertisements (118 valid ads), which are mainly collected from English magazines and newspapers. According to Yule's classification on pragmatic presuppositions, the author tries to analyze the usage and effectiveness of these five types of presuppositions and the gender difference in acceptance of these pragmatic presuppositions. Results show that pragmatic presupposition occurs in 78.6% of the collected 118 ads. Among all the types of pragmatic presuppositions, existential presupposition accounts for the largest percentage (43.2%), followed by state presupposition (23.7%) and fact presupposition (17.7%). Factive presupposition and state presupposition are the two most effective pragmatic presupposition among all the presuppositions. There also exists gender difference. It turns out that women tend to select the advertisements which contain more factive presupposition and belief presupposition while men are likely to choose those advertisements which include more state presupposition and behavior presupposition.The study of the pragmatic presupposition in advertising language is implicational both practically and theoretically. It has been concluded that pragmatic presupposition occurs frequently in advertising language, and plays an important part in fulfilling the commercial purposes of advertising. The study can enrich the understanding of pragmatic presupposition and help advertisers to make more successful ads and make daily communication more efficient.