A Study Of Pragmatic Vagueness In English Advertising From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Pragmatic vagueness is a communicative strategy usually employed by advertisement designers to promote sales. In recent years, as advertising plays a more and more important role in our life, pragmatic vagueness in advertising has stimulated wide attention of linguists. Under this background, the present thesis analyzes pragmatic vagueness in English advertising from the perspective of Verschueren’s Linguistic Adaptation Theory. It aims at directing advertisement-making, advertisement-interpretation and English learning.Verschueren puts forward Linguistic Adaptation Theory on the basis of researches toward relevant pragmatic theories. According to this theory, the use of language is a continuous process of making linguistic choices. Besides, the reason why the continuous making of linguistic choices can be carried out is that language has three properties, namely, variability, negotiability and adaptability. Furthermore, the notion of adaptability provides four angles of investigation for language use, that is, the structural objects of adaptability, the contextual correlates of adaptability, the dynamics of adaptability and the salience of adaptation process. This thesis, under the guidance of this Adaptation Theory, explores the structural variability, the contextual adaptability and the functions of pragmatic vagueness in English advertising through both quantitative and qualitative analyses of210English advertisement samples, which are randomly collected from English newspapers, magazines, books on advertising and Internet. To be specific, the following three research questions are approached in this thesis:1) What are the linguistic choices in advertisements that put pragmatic vagueness into action?2) How is advertising language adapted to different non-linguistic contextual correlates by virtue of pragmatic vagueness?3) What functions does pragmatic vagueness in advertising perform?The results show that pragmatic vagueness in advertising can be put into action by polysemy, homophones, hedges, vague verbs, non-numerical vague quantifiers, numerical vague quantifiers, frequency words, descriptive adjectives, comparatives and superlatives, irregularities of reference, indefinite pronouns, ellipsis, word order variations arid disjunctive sentences. Besides, the adaptation process can be influenced by consumers’ psychological contexts, such as their needs of security, emotion, likeness etc., social contexts, such as social culture and conventions, and physical contexts, such as time and space. The strategy of pragmatic vagueness can make the advertising language adapt to the above non-linguistic contextual correlates. Moreover, pragmatic vagueness in advertising can enhance the impression and persuasion of advertising, improve the flexibility of advertising, contribute the accuracy of advertising, create the vividness and liveliness of advertising, embody politeness of advertising and generate some negative effects if misused.