从语用学角度分析广告语

Analyzing Characteristics of English Advertisement Language From the Perspective of Pragmatics

Xingrui Liu

School of Foreign Languages, Yunnan Normal University, Kunming, P.R. China

Abstract

Advertising guru Ogilvie oncce said, advertising is the life of the words. His words point out the importance of advertising language for advertising. In the fierce competitive contemporary society, businessmen try to make use of a variety of advertising to promote products and services in order to quickly expand their products in the market. Because among various kinds of advertisement, a distinctive advertising language plays a great role in selling products. Advertising text is widely concerned by scholars at home and abroad because of its remarkable characteristics. Analyzing characteristics of English advertisement language from the perspective of pragmatics, it’s not difficult to find harmonious and unified context is beneficial to enrich advertisement information and promote the understanding of advertising . Smart advertisers will often hide transfer the information in the presupposition of advertising language, release products information and promote products in the market with the help of presupposition; the advertising language through violation of the cooperative principle intentionally or unintentionally in public to transfer products information, so that consumers can infer the conversational implicature instead of it’s surface meaning, therefore，businessmen are able to highlight the characteristics and advantages of their products .

Keywords: advertising language; pragmatics; theory; usage

1. Introduction

Advertisements are getting their way into our daily life: they may smile to us from the television screen, shout to us from the radio loudspeakers, wave invitingly to us from

every page of the newspaper and magazine, pluck at our sleeves on the buses and escalators, signal to us from roadside billboards and flash to us on the Internet. Advertisements, in any of mass media communication frequently make use of the direct approach of rhetorical devices to objectify appeals and enhance its persuasive power.

However, when a large number of marvelous advertisements flood into another nation, their renditions could not always be as wonderful as the original and, therefore, might fail to produce similar effects on the target audience. Puzzled and stimulated by this problem, the author of this thesis has made an intensive study of analyzing the characteristics of English advertising language from the perspective of pragmatics to find a way of improving the efficiency of advertisement.

With the establishment of socialist market economy and the rapid expansion of economic exchanges, especially after China’s entry into the WTO, international economic activities become more frequent and foreign trade more active. A successful advertisement, fine in the use of words, sentences, and rhetoric in order to be new, vivid and fascinating, is a unique and crafted product of creators. Through the examples of English advertisement, this paper mainly explores the way of improving the efficiency of advertisement.

Advertising has become a popular subject of numerous scholarly studies approached from a wide range of disciplines, such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, linguistics, literary criticism, aesthetics, marketing and media studies, for all kinds of advertisements have bombarded each of us in our daily life. Advertisements from the highways, radio, TV, magazines, newspapers and the Internet invade our ears and eyes with repetitive message and arouse our attention. Advertising is an effective and critical tool not only to promote tangible commodities and services such as hairdressing but also to promote economic, political, religious and social ideas. The essence of advertis ing’s global significance may have been captured by the British novelist Noman Douglas when he remarked, “You can tell the ideals of nation by its advertisements” (Wilson, 1989:263). Therefore, the study of advertising has taken on new significance.