摘 要

广告的目的就是为了吸引目标观众的注意，从而引起他们的兴趣，进而激起其购买的欲望，最终说服其产生购买行为。而且为了达到这一目标，广告商为此采用了各种各样的手段。本文以词汇语用充实中语用收缩与扩充为切入点，来解释和分析广告是如何通过语用充实吸引受众完成购买行为的。期望这一新尝试可以将广告英语的理论价值挖掘出来,并且可以对其语言特征及语言现象作出有力的解释,使目标观众更好地理解、运用广告,于此同时也为广告创作人提供有益的帮助、参考。

关键词：词汇语用充实；语用收缩；语用扩充；广告

Contents

1.Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………1

2.Demonstration…………………………………………………………………………………3

2.1 Advertisement………………………………………………………………………………3

2.1.1 Introduction of Advertisement…………………………………………………………3

2.1.2 Purpose of Advertisement………………………………………………………………4

2.2 Lexical Pragmatic Enrichment……………………………………………………………5

2.2.1 Introduction of Lexical Pragmatic Enrichment………………………………………6

2.2.2 Two ways in Lexical Pragmatic Enrichment…………………………………………7

2.2.2.1 Pragmatic Narrowing…………………………………………………………………7

2.2.2.2 Pragmatic Broadening ………………………………………………………………9

2.3 Lexical Pragmatic Enrichment in Advertisement……………………………………10

2.3.1 Interpretation of Pragmatic Narrowing in Advertisement…………………………10

2.3.2 Interpretation of Pragmatic Broadening in Advertisement………………………12

2.4 Purpose of Lexical Pragmatic Enrichment in Advertisement………………………14

3. Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………………15

Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………………17

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………18

Study of Lexical Pragmatic Enrichment in Advertisement

1. Introduction

As the world enters an era of commercialization, advertising has already permeated every corner of society. People can see and hear all kinds of advertisements everywhere at anytime. Advertisement as the main adviser of purchasing plays a vital role in daily life. Advertising has become a measure to cause you to remember a brand or identity, to keep that company name in your mind and to promote the mass consumption in the new consumer-oriented society. Generally speaking, we live in an advertising world. Therefore, the study of advertising has taken on new significance.

Although relatively advertising has a short history of only one hundred years, the study of advertising language has been conducted by scholars both at home and abroad have used different theories to analyze advertisement and achieved significant achievements, such as G. N. Leech (1966), G. Cook (1992) and Huang Guowen (2001) have studied the language of advertising from different perspectives and have made some fruitful findings. Abroad, the most influential study of advertising language is Leech’ s English in Advertising: A Linguistic Study of Advertising in Great Britain. It was written in 1966s and thoroughly given us an analysis of the features of advertising with a quantitative methodology which influential and significant today. In domestic, most researchers’ academic theses and books contain advertisement from traditional perspectives of rhetoric and syntax which are few and far from satisfaction, because they describe its language without giving theoretical explanation to them. A few scholars like a famous professor in Zhong Shan University named Huang Guowen, who published Theory and Practice of Discourse Analysis: A Study in Advertising Discourse in 2001s. In this book, he studies the characteristics of advertising language from functional grammar in the book. He believed “functional grammar is more suitable to make discourse analysis than any other linguistic theories, and thus, we can use this theory to guide our discourse analysis wholly.” (Huang, 2001: 3).

However, the previous studies are not satisfied. Just as Cao Zhiyun said: “Up till the present moment, most of the researchers with regard to advertising language are still limited to the appreciation of art, rhetorical comment and writing techniques, and few people explore its theoretical value” (曹志耘, 1992：2-3). He, obviously, considers such researchers are lacking in theoretical and practical value. The characteristics of advertisement are formed under the perspectives of sociology, linguistics, psychology, even marketing and aesthetics. Also, to achieve the result of passing information on and promoting sales, pragmatic strategies as the most basic and widely used means are necessarily employed in advertising.

Lexical pragmatics is a new topic of linguistics in the last ten years or so and it is a new branch of pragmatics and develops fast. It is a dynamic process in several factors and involved semantics, lexicology, pragmatics and cognitive linguistics. Lexical pragmatics will be respectively introduced from its brief introduction and its two ways of enrichment—pragmatic narrowing and pragmatic broadening, especially pragmatic processing of lexical terms in utterance comprehension. Pragmatic enrichment is a process, in which according to the personal need and the context the communicators process the target language(Blunter, 133). Simultaneously, pragmatic enrichment has two forms, including narrowing and broadening, and can be considered as a process of processing information and lexicon. The decoded meaning of the lexicon denotes specific meanings under specific contexts, so the denoted sphere or the implication is narrowed, and it is called lexical narrowing (Ran Yongping, 2005: 345).Lexical broadening, the same as narrowing, is undertaken in the search for relevance and results from the mutual adjustment of context and cognitive effects, constrained by expectations of relevance and raised by the utterance are satisfied. (Wilson, 1998: 62). The lexical pragmatic enrichment has been studied in recent years as one of the branches of pragmatics. Both aboard and at home, the scholars studied it from various perspectives. However, the previous research in advertising is less studied. In order to draw audiences' attention, excite their interests, stimulate their desires, create their conviction, and ultimately persuade them to take the purchasing action. Advertisers will resort to all kinds of approaches to achieve these aims and pragmatic strategies as the most basic and widely used means are necessarily employed in advertising. It is reckoned that the production and interpretation of advertisements can not be separated from both the admen and its audiences' analysis and understanding of lexical pragmatics enrichment. Therefore, this thesis tries to examine and analyze advertisement from the perspective of pragmatic narrowing and broadening in lexical pragmatic enrichment.

This thesis will give an analysis of advertising language and in lexical pragmatic enrichment from the perspective of pragmatic narrowing and broadening. It is divided into five parts: Part one gives a brief introduction of the advertisement and the purpose of advertising. Part two is the theoretical part. It provides an introduction of lexical pragmatic enrichment and two ways of enrichment--lexical narrowing and broadening. Part three analyzes the progress of lexical pragmatic enrichment in advertisement from the perspective of lexical narrowing and broadening. Part four explains the purpose of lexical pragmatic enrichment in advertisement which echoes the purpose of advertisement in part one and then shows a figure to help readers have a better understanding of the purpose of lexical pragmatic enrichment in Advertisement. The last part is the conclusion of this thesis.