（外国语言学及应用语言学专业论文）广告语言中的预设分析.pdf

shanghai jiao tong university m.a. thesis ii 内容摘要内容摘要 伴随全球经济一体化的发展以及和报纸电视等现代大众传媒的广泛结合， 广告已经成为现代生活中不可或缺的部分。除了视觉及听觉手段，广告的说服 力主要体现在对广告语言的运用。很多西方语言学家从社会语言学、跨文化研 究、文体学、语用学等方面对广告语言进行了卓有成效的探索。但是从预设的 角度对广告语言进行研究还是近年来提出的新观点，因此对预设与广告的关系 以及预设在广告中的功能的系统性研究至今为数甚微，并且在研究深度及方法 上都有所欠缺。 本文以预设的定义、特点和广告语言的主要功能、要求为切入点，通过殷 实的广告实例详实深入地分析了预设与广告的语言形式、预设与广告的信息传 递、预设与广告的语篇连贯以及预设与广告的心理策略和市场策略之间的紧密 关系，而且还运用了关联理论、面子理论、以及语篇分析理论对此进行一定的 分析，从而论证了预设在广告中的积极功能：预设使广告语言更具说服力，从 而帮助广告实现其最终的语用功能。 希望该论文能对预设在广告中的运用提供一定的理论指导，并且对广告语 言设计产生一定的启发。 关键词：预设，广告，广告语言，语用功能 shanghai jiao tong university m.a. thesis iii abstract with the intense globalization and the marriage of advertising and mass media, advertising has been so pervasive and influential in human life that has become an indispensable part of modern life. the language of advertising, as well as other aids and appeals, is of decisive significance to the persuasiveness and effectiveness of advertising. ever since geoffrey leech pioneered the linguistic analysis of advertising language, it has been well addressed from the perspectives of sociolinguistics, cross- cultural studies, stylistics and pragmatics, etc. however, it is found that few efforts have been spared on the systematic analysis of the functions of presupposition in advertising language and if any, a thorough exploration is rare, in other words, further work on presupposition in advertising is needed. starting with the theories on presupposition and advertising language, the thesis expounds and analyzes the pragmatic functions that presupposition performs in advertising from four macroscopic angles: presupposition and the form of advertising language; presupposition and advertising information; presupposition and the discourse of advertising; presupposition and psychology and market strategies of advertising. besides, such theories as relevance theory, face theory and discourse analysis theory are adopted to further illustrate the positive pragmatic functions of presupposition in advertising. this thesis features with not only its comprehensive and incisive studies on the subject matter but its vast amount of advertising data in the process of analysis. it is hoped that this thesis can provide theoretical guidance in the application of presupposition in advertising, as well as enlightenment to advertising copywriters to achieve their actual goals. key words: presupposition, advertising, advertising language, pragmatic function 上海交通大学 学位论文原创性声明 上海交通大学 学位论文原创性声明 本人郑重声明：所呈交的学位论文，是本人在导师的指导下， 独立进行研究工作所取得的成果。除文中已经注明引用的内容外， 本论文不包含任何其他个人或集体已经发表或撰写过的作品成果。 对本文的研究做出重要贡献的个人和集体，均已在文中以明确方式 标明。本人完全意识到本声明的法律结果由本人承担。 学位论文作者签名：王海燕 日期： 2006 年 1 月 16 日 上海交通大学 学位论文版权使用授权书 上海交通大学 学位论文版权使用授权书 本学位论文作者完全了解学校有关保留、使用学位论文的规 定，同意学校保留并向国家有关部门或机构送交论文的复印件和电 子版，允许论文被查阅和借阅。本人授权上海交通大学可以将本学 位论文的全部或部分内容编入有关数据库进行检索，可以采用影印、 缩印或扫描等复制手段保存和汇编本学位论文。 保密保密，在 年解密后适用本授权书。 本学位论文属于 不保密 不保密。 （请在以上方框内打“” ） 学位论文作者签名： 王海燕 指导教师签名：周国强 日期： 2006 年 1 月 16 日 日期： 2006 年 1 月 16 日 shanghai jiao tong university m.a. thesis i acknowledgements i extend my sincere thanks to those who have supported and encouraged me in the course of writing this thesis. first of all, i am deeply indebted to my supervisor, professor zhou guoqiang, for his academic guidance and personal support, without which this thesis would not have been possible. it is his acumen and insight that have guided me to make the best efforts at every turn and prompted me to seek new approaches of the research. sincere gratitude also goes to professor chen demin, whose erudite lectures on semantics have provided great enlightenment in the selection of the subject. besides, thanks should be expressed to other professors who have instructed and enlightened me during the past two and a half years in school of foreign languages of shanghai jiao tong university. special hearty appreciation goes to guo hongjie. his academic consciousness and respectable patience are substantially conducive to the writing of this thesis. besides, i would like to thank my beloved friends for their timely and candid suggestions during the writing of the thesis. last but not least, i would like to thank my husband liu yunfeng for his enduring support and encouragement for my postgraduate study. for all the encouragements and suggestions from the above individuals, all the mistakes and pitfalls are entirely mine. shanghai jiao tong university m.a. thesis 1 chapter 1 introduction 1.1 rationale of the research with the intense globalization and the marriage of advertising and mass media, advertising has been so pervasive and influential in human life that has become an indispensable part of modern life. advertising, once well employed, is an especially effective vehicle of promoting sales, providing services and building images. as is generally recognized, the purpose of advertising is to persuade. in advertising communication, advertisers not only transfer information in a technical sense, but also convey their intentions of persuasion by performing such activities as suggesting, advising, inviting, tickling, etc. meanwhile, consumers might also take interest in what advertisers intentions suggest as well as in the information about the product itself. they want satisfaction and social acceptance from the advertised products. as martin davidson says (1992:143), “ads give us a taste of paradise, they are utopian. their stories are of fullness of being, their conceits, of paradise consumed.” advertising aims to persuade the targeted audience to buy a certain product or service, thus it must be appealing and persuasive enough to attract their attention, to arouse their interest, to stimulate their desires and to encourage their purchasing actions. the language of advertising, as well as other aids and appeals, is of decisive significance to the persuasiveness and effectiveness of advertising. ever since geoffrey leech pioneered the linguistic analysis of advertising language, it has been well addressed from the perspectives of sociolinguistics, cross-cultural studies, stylistics and pragmatics, etc. as a very important topic in linguistic, especially in pragmatics, presupposition is frequently employed in advertising to achieve the effects of persuasion due to its special properties and characteristics. however, to study advertising language from the perspective of presupposition is a new approach in recent years. jean stillwell peccei (1999) points out in his pragmatics that presupposition can serve advertising and he also provides some examples to support his idea. the chinese scholar chen xinren (1998) demonstrates a similar point of view to peccei in his thesis. he contributes further with his classification of shanghai jiao tong university m.a. thesis 2 presupposition in advertising. their studies lay a good foundation for this thesis. however, neither peccei nor chen gives a systematic and comprehensive analysis of concrete functions of presupposition in advertising: pecceis presentation appears simple and brief and chen xinrens thesis does not elaborate on the ways presupposition serves advertising language. in other words, further work on presupposition in advertising is needed. 1.2 objectives of the thesis the thesis is designed to make a thorough exploration on the various functions of presupposition in advertising language. it will expound and analyze the pragmatic functions that presupposition performs in advertising from four macroscopic angles: presupposition and the form of advertising language; presupposition and advertising information; presupposition and the discourse of advertising; and presupposition and psychology and market strategies of advertising. besides, such theories as relevance theory, face theory and discourse analysis theory will be adopted to further illustrate the positive pragmatic functions of presupposition in advertising. it is hoped that this thesis can provide theoretical guidance in the application of presupposition in advertising, as well as enlightenment to advertising copywriters to achieve their actual goals. 1.3 outline of the thesis the thesis makes its base on the assumption that pragmatic functions of language will determine the use of language. it consists of four chapters. chapter one introduces the whole thesis. chapter two is divided into two parts. the first part reviews previous studies of presupposition, some definitions and features of presupposition. the second part gives definition to advertising and advertising language, generalizes features of adverting language and illustrates requirements for advertising language. chapter three is the core part of this thesis in which a concrete analysis of presupposition in advertising is conducted with abundant samples. it is also composed of two parts. the first part makes a classification of presupposition in advertising. the shanghai jiao tong university m.a. thesis 3 second part expounds and analyzes the pragmatic functions that presupposition performs in advertising from four macroscopic angles: presupposition and the form of advertising language; presupposition and advertising information; presupposition and the discourse of advertising; and presupposition and psychology and market strategies of advertising. chapter four comes to the conclusion that presupposition contributes to the persuasiveness and effectiveness of advertising and helps fulfill the ultimate purposes of advertising. 1.4 data sources the sample advertisements in this thesis cover as many products as possible to show the features and functions of presupposition in advertising. they are mainly from tv commercials, magazines, posters and some books on advertising. the sources of the advertisements are acknowledged in the bibliography. english language will be the focus of the thesis and “advertising language” mentioned refers to advertising english only. shanghai jiao tong university m.a. thesis 4 chapter 2 literature review 2.1 literature review on presupposition 2.1.1 a brief review of studies on presupposition presupposition is a subject widely studied by linguists nowadays, but actually it has its roots in philosophy just like other important linguistic notions. the german philosopher gottlob frege initially brought presupposition to the scholarly world. in 1892 frege put forward the term “presupposition” to describe the following phenomenon as shown in the relationship between sentences 1 and 2. examples provide by him are as follows: 1 kepler died in misery. 2 there was a man called kepler. 3 kepler didnt die in misery. from sentence 1 we can infer sentence 2. this kind of inference is not part of the logical meaning of the sentence. however, sentence 2 is the precondition of the use of sentence 1. therefore frege concluded, “if anything is asserted, there is always an obvious presupposition that the simple or compound proper names used have a reference.”1 he also pointed out that the same presupposition could be obtained in the corresponding negative sentence. that is to say, sentence 3 also presupposes sentence 2. besides the aforesaid, frege also noted that temporal clauses also contain presupposition. the british philosopher bertrand russell, however, did not agree with freges distinction between sense and reference, which he translated as “meaning” and “denotation”. in 1905 he advanced a descriptive theory to explain this phenomenon. his methods of analysis are as follows: 4 a. i met a man. b. i met x, and x is human. in the above example, the proposition a is analyzed as b. in this way, the denoting phrases are broken up, analyzed away, or eliminated. they are no longer there in the 1 quoted by jiang wangqi shanghai jiao tong university m.a. thesis 5 resultant propositions. the original proposition is now seen as a conjunction of the new propositions. later in 1918 he said that sentence 5 can be analyzed as a conjunction of the three propositions in 6 as follows: 5 the present king of france is bald. 6 a. there is a king of france. b. there is no one else who is king of france. c. the king of france is bald. he also held that if one of the propositions in conjunctions of propositions is false then the whole utterance with conjunctions of propositions is false. russells point of view remained largely unchallenged for 45 years. in 1950, peter strawson proposed a new theory of presupposition to retort russell, thus pushing the study of presupposition into a new stage and making it less imperfect. strawson thought that a sentence and the use of it should be distinguished clearly. by doing so, many thorny problems can be resolved with ease. in his opinion, the sentence does not have the problem of being true or false, but only the statement made through the sentence does. for instance: 7 the king of france is wise. 8 there is a present king of france. such a statement as 7 may be true in 1670, and may be false in 1770; while in 1970 there is no problem of being true or false because there does not exist the french king. strawson pointed out that there was a special relationship between sentences 7 and 8. that is to say, 8 is the precondition for the speaker to utter sentence 7; otherwise, there is no point to talk about whether the king is wise or not. in the book introduction to logical theory, strawson (1952) explicitly used the term “presupposition”, defined in opposition to entailment (see 2.1.2.1), to describe this kind of relationship and he considered it as a kind of particular pragmatic inference. since strawson, the discussion on presupposition has been connected with context. the original philosophical studies on presupposition caused great responses in the linguistic field. treated as a kind of semantic relation, presupposition used to be shanghai jiao tong university m.a. thesis 6 subsumed under the scope of semantics. however, in recent years, linguists show a rising interest in the study of presupposition from the pragmatic perspective. works in the 1970s (e.g., morgan, stalnaker) show that presupposition is too sensitive to contextual factors to be considered semantic and semantic theories of presupposition are theoretically inadequate. it is more or less agreed now that presuppositions are not properties inherent in particular lexical items or constructions, but properties of utterances, that is, of sentences together with a context. in this case, presupposition has gradually become an important pragmatic topic. 2.1.2 two approaches to presupposition there are basically two approaches to presupposition at the present time. one is to study presupposition from the semantic point of view, and the other is from the pragmatic perspective. 2.1.2.1 semantic presupposition presupposition has been an important topic in semantics. semantic presupposition is defined as assumptions or inferences which are closely tied to the meaning of lexical items or constructions. when a speaker uses referring expressions like this, he or shakespeare, in normal circumstances, he/she is working with an assumption that the hearer knows which referent is intended. in a more general way, speakers continually design their linguistic messages on the basis of assumptions about what their hearers already know. these assumptions may be mistaken, of course, but they underlie much of what we say in the everyday use of language. “what a speaker assumes is true or is known by the hearer can be described as a presupposition” (yule, 1996: 132). one of the tests used to check for the presuppositions underlying sentences involves negation a sentence with a particular presupposition and considering whether the presupposition remains true. for example: 9 a. my car is a wreck. (affirmative) b. my car is not a wreck. (negative) c. i have a car. in the above example, although sentences a and b have opposite meanings, sentence c. shanghai jiao tong university m.a. thesis 7 remains true in both. this is called constancy under negation test for presupposition. constancy under negation is one crucial feature of presupposition. in order to provide a clear picture of the concepts of both presupposition and constancy under negation, it is essential to distinguish presupposition from entailment. presupposition seems like entailment，a fairly automatic relationship, involving no reasoning, which seems free of contextual effects. however, presupposition is quite different from entailment. a presupposition is something the speaker assumes to be the case prior to making an utterance. speakers, not sentences, have presuppositions. while an entailment is something that logically follows from what is asserted in the utterance (yule, 2000: 25). sentences, not speakers, have entailments. if we negate an entailing sentence, the entailment fails; but negating a presupposing sentence allows the presupposition to survive. for example: 10 a. john met mary in the morning. b. john did not meet mary in the morning. c. john met someone in the morning. in the above example, sentence a entails sentence c, but if we negate sentence a to form sentence b, it no longer entails sentence c. in this case, sentence c no longer automatically follows from the preceding sentence b, although it may be true, we are not in a position to know. however, with presupposition, it is quite another story. lets look back at example 9. obviously, sentence a presupposes sentence c. when we negate sentence a to form sentence b, the resulting sentence still has the presupposition c. the remarkable difference between presupposition and entailment lies in that negating the presupposing sentence does not affect the presupposition, whereas, negating an entailing sentence destroys the entailment. a truth-based definition of entailment and presupposition might allow us to tell the difference more clearly. we