Chapter 1 Introduction介绍
1.1 Research Background研究背景
广告作为商品经济的产物，在社会中发挥着重要作用。 “广告”的含义可以追溯到拉丁语广告，意思是“吸引或吸引人们的注意力”，而中文意思是广泛宣传信息。广告是一种音频或视觉形式，它采用公开赞助的非个人信息来宣传或销售产品，服务或创意。凭借其真实性，灵活性，多样性和盈利能力，广告在传播服务信息方面也处于至关重要的地位。
广告语言在广告传播领域的研究重点在于其创作策略，图像构建方法，信息反馈等。虽然语言学领域的广告语言研究认为语言用于服务广告策略。因此，国内对语言学领域广告语言的历史研究经历了三个阶段。在开创性阶段，主要从语言学的微观角度对广告语言的语音，词汇和修辞特征进行分析。后来，研究的重点转向语言学的宏观视角，如社会语言学，心理语言学和文化语言学。最近的研究已经转向跨学科的视角，将语言学与现代广告，经济学，传播学和法学相结合。As a product of the commodity economy, advertisements play an important role in the society. The meaning of “advertisement” can be traced back to the Latin Advertere, which means “attracting or alluring people’s attention,” while the Chinese meaning is to publicize information widely. Advertising is an audio or visual form that employs an openly sponsored, non-personal message to promote or sell a product, service or idea. With its authenticity, flexibility, diversity and profitability, advertising also stands a crucial position in spreading service information. The focus of research on advertising language in the domain of advertising communication lies in its creative strategies, the methods of image construction, information feedback and so on. While the research on advertising language in the domain of linguistics holds a view that language is used to serve advertising strategies. Accordingly, the historical domestic research on the advertising language in the domain of linguistics goes through three phases. At the pioneering stage, analyses are mainly conducted about the phonetic, lexical and rhetoric features of advertising language from the micro perspective of linguistics. Later, the focus of research shifts to the macro perspective of linguistics, such as sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics and cultural linguistics. Recent studies have moved to an interdisciplinary perspective, combining linguistics with modern advertisement, economics, communication and jurisprudence.
As a branch of linguistics, pragmatics is the new rising science. Based on nine kinds of definition which are put forward by Levinson, S. in Pragmatics in 1983, domestic linguists give their own accounts, namely pragmatics studies the appropriate expression and precisely understanding of the utterance meaning in different contexts, in order to look for and establish the basic principles and maxims which could help express appropriately and understand precisely the utterance meaning. As mentioned above, advertising, with the public character, employs an openly sponsored, non-personal message to spread advertisers’ ideas for promoting products and services. Therefore, pragmatics plays a significant role in the research and creation of advertising language, because both pragmatics and advertising involve two common problems that how to express the discourse meaning properly, and how to make the discourse meaning understood exactly. Whether an advertisement could successfully realize the sales goal and facilitate the communication between the advertiser and consumers, I should argue, is a matter of pragmatics.
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1.2 Significance of the Present Study
Pragmatic analysis of advertising language, in essence, is the analysis of conversational implicatures in advertising language. The theory of conversational implicatures proposed by the renowned linguist and philosopher Grice, H. P., as well as Cooperative principle and the four conversational maxims, namely Quantity maxim, Quality maxim, Relation maxim and Manner maxim, has been the significant part in pragmatics. According to Grice (1975: 41-58), the conversational implicature of an expression cannot be decoded easily, but be gained in reference to Cooperative principle. It is called the classical theory of Gricean conversational implicature. Latter, the ideas of particularized conversational implicature and generalized conversational implicature are discussed by many scholars, such as Harnish (1991), Leech (1983), Levinson (1983, 1987a, 1987b, 1995, 2000) and Horn (1984, 1992). Then the revised theories are named neo-Gricean theories, mainly about some universal pragmatic apparatus, providing powerful explanation to conversational implicatures, especially generalized conversational implicature which is usually ignored by the classical theory. For Levinson (1987b), he has argued for a revision, as well as a reduction of the Gricean maxims. The tripartite model is put forward by him in his 1987 paper “Pragmatics and the Grammar of Anaphor: A Partial Pragmatic Reduction of Binding and Control Phenomena”. As a matter of fact, the Q-, I- and M-principles are Grice’s two maxims of Quantity and a maxim of Manner reinterpreted neo-classically. What is more, the ideas of Levinson have been developed into mature theories, including the main ideas of such above scholars to a great extent. Thus the theory which this paper adopts to discuss the conversational implicatures from a neo-Gricean perspective is based on Levinson’s tripartite model .
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Chapter 2 Literature Review
2.1 A General Review of Neo-Gricean Pragmatic
heories The neo-Gricean pragmatic theories, such as Hornian system, and Levinsonian system, are developed from the theory of conversational implicatures, proposed by Grice. The aim of this part is to critically review some research on conversational implicatures which have developed from the classical Gricean theory to the neo-Gricean theories.
2.1.1 Conversational Implicature and Grice’s Cooperative Principle
Conversational implicature, or implicature for short, stands as one of the most important concepts in pragmatics. According to Levinson (1983), the prominence of this concept in pragmatics depends on its three contributions. First, it provides some significant functional explanations of linguistic facts. Second, it bridges a gap which we cannot expect a semantic theory to make up between what is literally expressed and what does the speaker mean. Third, the notion of implicature offers a genuine and substantial solution to the sorts of problems that the natural language senses rise in daily life.
What we have mentioned above is about why the notion of conversational implicature is so important. Next the theory of conversational implicatures will be given detailedly as below.
Grice notices that in daily life, people always make a distinction between what is said and what is implied. For example, when A and B are talking about their mutual friend C, who is now working in a bank, and A asks B how C is going on, B might answer “Oh quite well, I think; he likes his colleagues, and he hasn’t been to prison yet.” Here B certainly implied something, though he did not say it explicitly. Then Grice coins the term implicature, and tries to explore the question how people manage to convey implicatures implicitly. In his lecture under the title of “Logic and conversation” published in 1975, he depicts that “Our talk exchanges do not normally consist of a succession of disconnected remarks, and would not be rational if they did. They are characteristically, to some degree at least, cooperative efforts; and each participant recognizes in them, to some extent, a common purpose or set of purposes, or at least a mutually accepted direction” (1975: 45). In other words, people who are talking seem to follow some principles like the following: “Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged ”(ibid.). And this principle is known as the Cooperative Principle, or CP for short.
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2.2 A General Review of Advertising Language
The research of advertising language belongs to the domain of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, because the language everybody uses, social dialects, and the technical jargon depend on the social environment. The advertising language which people adopt and see in diverse social backgrounds must reflect different cultural traits. As a main medium to publicize information widely, advertising language has been the subject of debate among scholars both at home and abroad. The aim of this part does not attempt to explain the development of advertising language, but to introduce the concept and characteristics of advertising language, and a number of pertinent studies from four perspectives, namely ethics, linguistics, sociology and semiotics.
2.2.1 Advertising and Advertising Language
What is advertising? That advertising is the foot on the accelerator, the hand on the throttle, the spur on the flank that keeps our economy surging forward, said by Sarnoff, shows the great power of advertising. The Committee on Definition of the American Marketing Association in 1948 provides a comprehensive and far-reaching definition that advertising is the non-personal communication of information usually paid for and persuasive in nature about products, service or ideas by identified sponsors through the various media. Dunn and Barban (1986) give another definition that advertising is a paid, non-personal message from an identifiable source delivered through a mass-mediated channel that is designed to persuade.
No matter how the definition changes, there are some key components. First of all, advertising is a type of communication. It is actually a very structured form of communication between the sponsor and consumers, employing both verbal and nonverbal elements. It is the language which the sponsor or the advertiser speaks to consumers, while after receiving this kind of language, consumers would bring their own interpretation to the advertising message. The fact that consumers create meaning from advertising results in many of the intended and unintended effects of advertising. Second, since it is the communication between the sponsor and consumers, it is also nonpersonal. Advertising is typically directed to groups of people rather than to individuals. Third, advertising is paid for by sponsors. As an advocate for sponsors, the advertising content is biased and contains a specific point of view.
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Chapter 3 Pragmatic Study of Advertising Language: a Neo-Gricean Perspective .................. 21
3.1 Q-principle and Advertising Language ................................. 21
3.1.1 Horn Scale in Advertising Language ............................. 21
3.1.2 Horn Scale and False Advertising ................................ 25
Chapter 4 Analysis of Consumers’ Perception of Advertising Language ................................. 44
4.1 Research Questions ................................ 44
4.2 Participants and Questionnaire Design .......................... 44
Chapter 5 Conclusion .......................................... 56
5.1 Major Findings of the Present Study ..................................... 56
5.2 Implications of the Study ................................... 57
5.3 Limitations ............................... 58
Chapter 4 Analysis of Consumers’ Perception of Advertising Language
4.1 Research Questions
As introduced in previous chapters, many studies on the advertising implicatures put emphasis on subjective statements of factors which may affect the persuasiveness of advertising by virtue of Grice’s Cooperative principle, such as cultural, social or psychology influences on consumers, yet the research probing into consumers’ perception of advertising implicatures through Levinson’s tripartite model is still lacking. In addition, the factors which might affect the perception of advertising implicatures on consumers’ side, such as gender, age and educational background are obviously underexplored in the extent literature. The research questions of questionnaire survey are listed as follows:
1. How well can consumers understand Q-implicatures, I-implicatures and M-implicatures in advertising language?
2. Do genders, ages and educational backgrounds affect consumers’ perception of scalar implicatures?
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Chapter 5 Conclusion
5.1 Major Findings of the Present Study
implicatures are realized. It is still suggested that consumers’ sense of scalar implicatures still need enhance, especially for those with low-levels of education. Otherwise they will be misled easily by advertisers.
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