The Study Of The Pragmatic Functions Of Ambiguity In English Advertising

Ambiguity abounds in every language in the world. It refers to a word or anexpression that can be interpreted in two or more than two ways. Though it may leadto misunderstandings in our daily communication, it is extremely favored in theadvertising world. As advertising is a commercial activity, to spend the least but toachieve the most is what advertisers pursue. To stand out in the ocean of ads,advertisers exhaust their wits by employing various techniques, including ambiguity.Ambiguity, with its advantage of “killing two birds with one stone”, is just theright choice for advertisers. This thesis intends to give a systematic analysis of thenature of ambiguity and advertising. Meanwhile, it tries to find out why ambiguity isso widely employed in English ads by expounding its pragmatic foundations (speechact theory, cooperative principle, politeness principle and relevance theory) and theprinciples of advertising, including the maximum economy principle, AIDA principle(to attract attention, arouse interest, stimulate desire and get action) and KISSprinciple (to keep it short and sweet) and systematically explore the marvelous effectambiguity can achieve on the part of the consumers, advertisers and the whole societyat large.Ambiguity translation in advertising has not been paid due attention. This thesistries to explore whether ambiguity should be retained in advertising translation andhow to translate ambiguity in advertising. In the author’s opinion, ambiguitycontributes to simplicity and the appealing and persuasive power of the original ad,and therefore should be retained as translated text has to be equivalent in meaning,style and flavor to the original one. There are mainly three methods to translateambiguity, namely, substitution, transliteration, and rewriting. Which one is the bestchoice depends on the concrete ad. This thesis mainly focuses on the production andpragmatic functions of ambiguity in advertising, and hopefully this preliminary study of ambiguity translation in advertising will draw fort h more comprehensive andsignificant studies in this field.