1、1Presupposition in Advertising LanguageAbstract. In modern society, advertising plays a very important role in peoples daily life. We cannot imagine the world without advertisements. Advertisers try every means to design persuasive advertisements for their products by attractive patterns, photos and
2、 colors, as well as language. The use of presupposition in advertising language, which is an important topic in pragmatics, can serve the function quite well. This paper first presents a general review of previous studies on presupposition phenomena in advertising language, and then investigates the
3、 use of presuppositions in advertising language. Presupposition can not only increase the information but also attract the consumers to make their own inferences, thus avoid the possible risk by direct assertion. Key words: presupposition,advertising language 1. Introduction 1.1 Background informati
4、on Advertising is an indispensable part of modern life on television, radio, or Internet, and in newspapers and magazines, 2on streets and buses and even on mobile phones. There is no doubt that our life is more or less influenced and changed by so much advertising around us in modern societies. Adv
5、ertisements are constructed to have the primary effect of selling products or services to the consumers. Advertisers use every possible means to catch peoples attention and persuade them to buy the advertised products. In order to serve their purposes, they cannot afford to neglect the role of langu
6、age in advertising. Presupposition has a great deal of importance in persuasive language, particularly in advertising language. Usually advertisers are not allowed to make direct assertion about their products. They can generally make indirect assertions through presupposition. Therefore, advertiser
7、s frequently use presuppositions in language to help advertising to realize its functions. 1.2 Literature Review Presupposition phenomena in advertising language are worth studying. In Pecceis book Pragmatics (1999), she suggests doing some exploration in this respect by giving one example to illust
8、rate the importance of presuppositions in advertising English. In The Language of Advertising (1998), Goddard points 3out briefly that presuppositions play an important role in English advertisements. Chen (1998) gives an account of the pragmatic presuppositions in Chinese advertisements. In his art
9、icle, he describes certain kinds of presuppositions without analyzing existential presupposition. The author finds that presupposition plays a vital role in advertisement language. On the basis of this, the paper tries to give some analysis of presupposition phenomena in English advertisements, type
10、 of presupposition realization and functions or roles that are played by presuppositions in this field. 2. Presupposition 2.1 Definition Presupposition, to some extent, is also called assumption. To get it across easily, lets see an example, (1) Marys children have slept. (2) Mary has children. In t
11、he above two sentences, if (1) is true, (2) must be true. While the addressee must know sentence 2, that is to say the speaker of sentence assumes that Mary must have children; otherwise we cannot say what Marys children have done. From pragmatic point of view, we can say (1) presupposes (2) From th
12、e sentences above we can see that, given two sentences a and b, 4whenever a is true, b is also true, we say a presuppose b, whenever a is either true or false, b is always true. 2.2 Classification Linguists interest in presupposition rises from their study on semantic relation between sentences. Kee
13、nan (1971) holds that there are two distinct kinds of presupposition in natural languages, semantic presupposition and pragmatic presupposition. From 1973 it has become increasingly clear that presupposition differs from other semantic relations in that it is very sensitive to context. It cannot be
14、viewed as a kind of sheer semantic relation. Presupposition should be studied from a pragmatic perspective or approach. The pragmatic approach views sentences as utterances of individuals who are communicating through the language. As for pragmatic presupposition, there are generally three kinds of
15、viewpoints. First, pragmatic presupposition refers to the assumptions made by the speaker about the context in which language communication takes place. Second, pragmatic presuppositions are treated as a felicity condition for implementing some speech act, which is necessary to the success of the sp
16、eech act. Last, some linguists regard pragmatic presupposition as the mutual knowledge between the speaker and 5the listener. However, people may have found that these three kinds of ideas are closely connected. There is something common among these three viewpoints of pragmatic presupposition: pres
17、upposition is the knowledge shared by the participants engaged in a communication act, which is the basis for the speaker to express himself or herself to listener because the speaker believes that the listener can understand what he or she says. Presupposition is common in advertisement language, w
18、hich is based on linguistic structure through logic concept, semantic, context and so on, as a prerequisite to infer the intended meaning. E.g. Marys dog is cute. Its semantic presupposition is Mary has a dog. Tell Mary I am at lunch. Its pragmatic presupposition is the speakers a series of assumpti
19、ons: the speaker make sure that Mary will appear soon after his words, addressee knows who Mary is, and he will take a message for the speaker. In a word, semantic presupposition is connected with sentence or sentence proposition, while pragmatic presupposition is connected with speaker. Semantic an
20、d pragmatic presupposition is often used in advertisement in order to convey more persuasive information through concise 6words. Look at the following example:1. if your heartburn medicine works so well, why do you keep getting heartburn? Ask your doctor about prilosec (medicine advertisement for he
21、artburn). 2. Do you know 3 out of 4 adults do not get enough calcium? It takes at least 3 glasses of milk a day. I always keep some at my pad (advertisement for “got milk”). Example 1, its semantic presupposition is that you are using heartburn medicine, you keep getting heartburn, and you have a pr
22、ivate doctor who knows something about Prilosec. This advertisements pragmatic presupposition is the audiences a series of association: some one suffers from heartburn, they need some medicine, the medicine can cure illness, and what doctors say is often believable. From this, the definite two sente
23、nces convey indefinite meanings. Since the law of advertisement disallows the advertiser directly claim or designate its products function without enough or clear evidence. The advertiser has to use fuzzy or indirect language, to presuppose the product and services goodness. Example 2, its semantic
24、presupposition is self-evident: 3 out of 4 adults dont get enough calcium, which abounds in milk. Its pragmatic presupposition is clear: some people drink or not drink milk, which is full of calcium, and it is good for health. From the 7above, we see that some pragmatic presuppositions are inferred
25、from background knowledge; so called background knowledge is information that is not explicitly expressed in utterance but known by speaker and addresser. Sometimes it is also called common knowledge. Example 1, its pragmatic presupposition: medicine can cure illness; doctors words are believable. E
26、xample 2, pragmatic presupposition is that calcium is good for health. Background knowledge plays such an important role in communication that the advertisers often make the consumers infer by themselves through the background knowledge in advertisement language and stimulate the consumer to buy the
27、ir goods. 3. A qualitative Analysis of Presuppositions in advertising Language Advertising language, as a kind of persuasive language, has to employ various strategies in order to convince the users. It is no exaggeration to say that successful advertisements are based on the systematic study of soc
28、ial psychology, especially the psychology of the consumers. Due to the special features of advertising language, the presuppositions in advertising English can be classified into following types: existential presupposition, factive presupposition, non-factive presupposition, structural 8presuppositi
29、on, and context-bound presupposition. 3.1 Existential presupposition It is a basic kind of presupposition, which typically presupposes the existence of something or some ideas. It is usually triggered by definite descriptions, which are formed by using proper names, definite article (the gorgeous, s
30、exy young fragranceadvertisement for fragrance, which presupposes there is a fragrance and the fragrance is gorgeous and sexy), demonstrative pronoun and possessives (they copied our triangle because they could not match our beeradvertisement for beer, which presupposes we have a triangle). Accordin
31、g to study of psychology and the Relevance Theory, people expect to find the optimal relevance with the minimal effort. In this respect, existential presupposition can save the consumers processing efforts while stimulate the consumers attention to focus on the most relevant information in the adver
32、tisement. Lets see an example. “Youll want Dome Be Gone, my revolutionary cure for baldness”. This is a medicine advertisement for baldness, which triggered by the possessive, holds a few presuppositions: there is a cure for baldness; the cure is revolutionary; I have this cure. The advertiser has s
33、uccessfully made assertions about his products in an indirect way, which can subtly 9influence the attitudes and the behaviors of the consumer although the assertions are only assumed to be true. Another example, look out for the distinctive packs in your local Bippo stockists and choose the one tha
34、t is just right for you. it presupposes that the packs are distinctive, Bippo is stocked locally, and there is a pack that is just for you. 3.2 Structural presupposition Apart from words and phrases presupposition, there exist a large number of structural presuppositions, which have something to do
35、with grammatical form of language. In some grammatical forms there are assumptive factors. That is to say when the speaker adopts this structure, he hopes the addressers to take the offered information as true information. For example wh-sentences e.g. why smoke if you do not enjoy it? I smoke becau
36、se I enjoy it. Salem is why. Advertisement for Salem cigarette, which presupposes that you have smoked Salem. Another example: who does your hair? I do it myself. It presupposes someone does your hair. What is soap doing to your face? Listen to the women who stopped using it. It presupposes that soa
37、p is doing something to your face and someone stopped using soap. Apart from wh-sentence, structural presupposition still contain comparative structure, (e.g. your house resembles 10ours, which presupposes we have a house), spilt sentence, time adverbial clause (e.g. After his father died, he steppe
38、d into a large fortune. It presupposes his father died) and attributive clause. Besides, the counterfactual presupposition called subjunctive clause presupposes an opposite meaning, e.g. If I had not burned the cake, we would be having it for sea. That the cake were not burnt is just a subjunctive c
39、ondition, and opposite to the fact. Did you buy this awful wine? It presupposes that this wine is awful. This question seems not difficult to understand. It is common sense. The advertisement makes use of it to imply another facts to achieve the consumers concern. How can healthy choice have less fa
40、t and more taste? The characteristics of healthy choiceless fat and good taste are clearly demonstrated here. 3.3 Factive presupposition It is another type of presuppositions, which can be triggered both lexically and syntactically. E.g. realize, know, regret, be aware that, be glad that, be strange that are factive verbs. Different with lexical presupposition, some definite words object or object clause reflects something had happened. It presupposes that information after that definite word is true. While lexical presupposition presupposes another
