An Analysis Of The Pragmatic Presupposition In We Chat Business Advertisements

WeChat Moments is a new function added by the fourth version of WeChat in April19,2012 where users can share their own lives with their WeChat friends.As a new platform for information sharing and releasing,WeChat Moments has been noticed by many WeChat Business advertisers who would like to adopt it to advertise their products and services to achieve the best advertising effective by taking advantage of this platform.The purpose of WeChat Business advertisements is to persuade friends in Moments to carry out buying behavior through advertising language,pictures and videos;however,the pragmatics itself studies how the language is used in actual life.Presupposition is frequently employed in adverting to enhance the effects of persuasion owing to its properties of subjectiveness and latency.Therefore,this study decides to analyze WeChat Business advertisements with the theory of presupposition in pragmatics.Based on the presupposition theory,the theory and characteristics of advertisements and the previous studies on pragmatic presupposition in advertisement,this thesis pointed out the similarity between the requirement of pragmatic presupposition and the characteristics of advertisements.It mainly discusses the following three questions:1)What types of pragmatic presupposition are employed in WeChat Business advertisements?2)How are the different types of pragmatic presupposition distributed in WeChat Business advertisements?3)What are the functions of pragmatic presupposition in WeChat Business advertisements?After the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the collected 100 WeChat Business advertisements involving pragmatic presupposition,the results of this study come out as follows:1)Taking the psychology of customers into consideration,the pragmatic presupposition employed in WeChat Business advertisements falls into five types:existential presupposition,fact presupposition,state presupposition,behaviour presupposition and belief presupposition.2)Among these 100 advertisements,the existential presupposition and the factive presupposition take up the higher percentage,with 40.1% and 24.5% respectively,and the next are state presupposition(14.3%)and behavior presupposition(11.6%).3)From the perspective of linguistic functions of advertisement,the pragmatic presupposition can bring conciseness and humor to advertisements and makes it more interesting and attractive;while in terms of pragmatic functions,it can help enlarge the amount of information,conceal some information to realize the aim of shortening the advertisements and hiding the instinct economic significance to make itself much easier for WeChat users to accept,and lead audience's thought and make them accept conveyed information easily.These functions will finally promote the potential consumers' buying behavior.This study is meaningful in two aspects: theoretically,it can help realize the importance of pragmatic presupposition,strengthen the understanding of pragmatic presupposition and then apply it to WeChat Business advertisements.Practically,this study can help advertisers design more attractive and persuasive advertisements with theoretical and scientific guidance in order to achieve the goal of promoting products or services and persuading audience's purchasing behavior,at the same time,it can also help the potential consumers know the WeChat Business advertisements correctly.