A Corpus-based Analysis On Pragmatic Presuppositions In Advertising Texts

As an integral part of modern life,advertisements have been playing the role of value guidance in reality.Nonetheless,Modern advertisements(hereinafter refers to as "ads")which are compulsory and didactic tend to be disliked,whilst they can result tactfully persuasive with successful use of pragmatic presuppositions.Thus,the study of advertising texts from the perspective of the Presuppositions Theory is drawing increasing attention.Although previous research on advertising texts were carried out from multiple perspectives,like stylist,semiology,sociolinguistics,rhetoric and pragmatics,etc.,they generally remained repetitive and scattered.Moreover,the ads in question,i.e.,mainly commercials randomly selected from the Internet,newspapers and magazines,etc.,were old and fragmented.Besides,little attention had been paid to the abuse and misuse of advertising texts.Chapter One briefly introduces the research background,research questions,the significance,the goal of the research and the structure of the dissertation.It elaborates on the corpus construction based on IAI China’s Advertising Yearbook(2001-2015),from which 889 advertising texts have been selected for the research.In terms of research method,both quantitative and qualitative analysis are adopted in the thesis.Chapter Two,as literature review,summarizes the current research in this field at home and abroad,and reviews the achievements and limitations of previous advertising texts study from the perspective of Presupposition Theory.In Chapter Three,qualitative analysis has been applied to the study of narrowly defined pragmatic presuppositions,cultural presuppositions and cognitive presuppositions in advertising texts,which is intended to reveal to what extent pragmatic presuppositions are used in ads and how Presupposition Theory guides the production and comprehension of ads through concept definition,characteristics introduction and illustration.Statistical analysis and contrastive analysis of pragmatic presuppositions in ads are made in Chapter Four,and the active role of successful presuppositions in advertising texts as well as the negative influence of the misuse of presuppositions are also explored.In Chapter Five,it is concluded that the use of pragmatic presuppositions in advertising is widespread and the theory of presupposition can well explain and guide the production and comprehension of advertisements,in that narrowly defined pragmatic presuppositions can tactfully achieve persuasion,and cultural presuppositions can enhance culture connotation and artistic aesthetic in advertising texts,while cognitive presuppositions can cater to advertising audience’s cognitive psychology and arouse the audience’s emotional identification.