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Academic Writing

August 25, 2015

Research on Violation of Cooperative Principle in

Advertising Language from the Perspective of Pragmatics

1. Introduction

Linguistics is widely used in our daily life. As a branch of applied linguistics, pragmatics plays an important role in various ways, of which the four maxims of cooperative principle is vividly demonstrated in advertising. English advertising is a special process of communication, the speaker is the advertiser and the hearer is the consumer. As we know, all the maxims are not followed by everybody all the time, that is to say both the advertiser and the consumer usually violate the maxims but they are aware of the violation in the common communication. In this special communication, the advertising language also should observe the cooperative principle to make the communicative language be appropriate, real, relevant, concise and straightforward. However this kind of advertisement is often unable to attract the attention of consumers, but those new unique English advertisements can draw the consumers’ attention. So these new unique English advertisements blatantly flout the maxims to make the consumers be aware of the violations and get the implicit meaning according to the literal meaning. Therefore the advertisers can make the consumers be interested in their products and stimulate the consumers’ desire for consumption and then ultimately achieve the purpose of advertisement.

2. Literature review

First, literature from abroad.

Speech act theory is proposed by British language philosopher J.L.Austin. In 1955, he gave a series of lectures in Harvard University, and later a book called “How to do

things with words” was published based on his speech (Austin,1962). Speech act theory holds that a person actually completes three different acts at the time of speaking: locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act. Relevance theory is put forwarded by Sperber and Wilson in last century. Sperber and Wilson thinks that language communication is an ostensive -- inferential process, instead of the traditional encoding – decoding one.(Dai,2002) Leech divides the politeness principle into seven types, which are tact maxim, generosity maxim, approbation maxim, modesty maxim, agreement maxim and sympathy maxim. United States linguist Grice thinks that in order to guarantee a smoothly conversation, the conversation must abide by some basic principles, especially the “cooperative principle” (Xu,1994). Although the conversational participants always abide by the cooperative principle, due to various reasons, these principles are often violated, resulting from what Grice calls “Conversational implicature”. In other words, any violation of cooperative principle makes language become indirect. Based on these theories, advertising language can be properly designed, achieve the pragmatic effect and finally persuade the consumers to buy their products.

Second, literature from home.

In China, the research on cooperative principle started in 1980s. And in the following twenty years, it had been the core content in pragmatics, and there are many researches based on cooperative principle. In terms of the development process, cooperative principle went from introduction to research and then towards application. (He,2000) In the introduction phase, the researchers are mainly concerned with the conception and content of cooperative principle; in the research phase, the researchers put forward different views of the four maxims; and in the application phase, they apply the cooperative principle to various kinds of oral or written language.

As one of the language phenomenon, advertising language is aimed at attracting customers and application of cooperative principle can help to make a successful advertising. Austin and Searle's speech act theory, Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory and the theory of Conversational Implicature together with Grice’s cooperative principle help to analyze the advertising data and reach the research goal.

3. Research questions

1) What is CP and what are the four maxims?

United States famous language philosopher Paul Grice (1975) proposed that in all communication activities of the different languages, in order to reach a certain goal, there is a tacit understanding between the speakers and the hearers, both of them comply with some principles(Grice,1976). This general principle is called the Cooperative Principle, abbreviated as CP(Xu,1997b). To specify the CP further, he introduced four categories of maxims (Hu,1988) as follows:

QUANTITY: 1. Make your contribution as informative as required.

2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. QUALITY: 1. Do not say what you believe to be false.

2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

RELATION: Be relevant.

MANNER: Be perspicuous, and specifically.

1. Avoid obscurity of expression.

2. Avoid ambiguity.

3. be brief.

4. be orderly.

2) What is the paper aimed at?

The goal of this research is to analyze advertising from the pragmatic perspective, and eventually make the advertising more impressive and attractive. The following will be the details. As a linguistic discipline, pragmatics mainly focuses on the relationship between language and context. The principles of pragmatics of advertising language holds that people’s verbal behavior is dominated by various social status, which is not separated from specific context.(Chen,2009) The specific context of language, combined with the humanistic, social and cultural background helps to understand the implied meaning of the advertising. And that’s why pragmatics studies language through context.

Modern language theory is flourished, such as Jane. Austin’s speech act theory and Grice’s cooperative principle. As a communication activity between the

advertisers and the consumers, the key to achieve the advertising effect is to propose points of sales or benefit promises, which is mainly achieved through language. Whether language can help to realize the advertising effect and the communication between advertisers and audiences depends heavily on whether the meaning of language can be fully understood. Therefore, with the help of pragmatics, especially the cooperative principle, the meaning of the advertising can be better understood and more successfully spread.(Xu,1993a)

4. Methodology

This paper aims at conducting a systemic research on the English advertisements and to achieve this purpose, both qualitative research and descriptive methods are adopted. Quantitative research is the systematic empirical investigation of observable phenomena via statistical, mathematical or numerical data or computational techniques. The objective of quantitative research is to develop and employ mathematical models, theories and/or hypotheses pertaining to phenomena. The process of measurement is central to quantitative research because it provides the fundamental connection between empirical observation and mathematical expression of quantitative relationships. It involves collecting, analyzing and interpreting advertising language data by observing what people do and say. The data in this paper are mainly attained through the access to some important websites, magazines and newspapers.

The advertisements in this paper are selected based on the following criteria. First, the advertisements have no grammatical errors. Second, the advertisements are chosen randomly. Based on the abundant selected model advertisements, this paper aims at analyzing the violation of cooperative principle in advertising Language from the perspective of pragmatics.

5. Expected results

“Advertising needs both to inform and to persuade”.(David,1969) So a good advertisement must have selling power, memory value, attention value and readability. Naturally, its language should be persuasive and have the sense of “urging”. Advertising is a special kind of communication activity. Advertising content includes

advertisers, advertising language and consumers. The purpose of an advertisement often means to promote products selling. So it must make the consumers understand the expected response to the advertisements and the known information, consuming context, CP etc. In order to attract the consumers’ attention and stimulate their desire for consumption, the advertisers usually violate the maxims of CP. With the development of economy, advertisements are voluminous and are also growing at an amazing rate. Therefore it is not enough to study them just from the perspective of CP and Conversational Implicature in pragmatics. We can also study them from other perspective such as deixis, speech act theory, and polite principle etc. And such exploration can be enough. Addition to the English advertising, pragmatics theories can also be used for other activities.

6. Works cited

[1] [3]戴炜栋、何兆熊，《新编简明英语语言学教程》，上海：上海外语教育出版社，2002.

[2]胡壮麟，《语言学教程》第三版，北京大学出版社，1988.

[4]陈新仁，《新编语用学教程》，外语教学与研究出版社 (2009-02出版) 何兆熊等. 2000. 新编语用学概要[M] . 上海: 上海外语教育出版社.

徐盛桓. 1994. 新格赖斯会话含意理论和含意否定[J]. 外语教学与研究(4). 徐盛桓. 1993a. 新格赖斯会话含意理论与语用推理[J]. 外国语(1).

徐盛桓. 1997b. 话语含意化过程[J]. 外国语(1).

Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words[M]. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Grice, H. P. 1975[1991]. Logic and conversation[A].

[5]David Crystal and Derek Davy. Investing English Style. (London: Longman, 1969)

Annotated bibliography

胡壮麟，《语言学教程》第三版，北京大学出版社，1988.

In Hu’s linguistic book, a unique chapter is proposed to study pragmatics, and cooperative principle is a critical aspect. In chapter 8, the author make a warming step to lead in the notion of context, which is crucial in pragmatic study. Then the author proposed what is called constatives and performertives. After introducing the speak act theory, CP was proposed, which further lead to the conversational implicature. CP has four maxims, and the book provides examples with every violation of CP. And such theories is of very importance in the analyzing of the violation of maxims in advertising. Finally, the author provides the notion of conversational implicature, which is deduced on the basis of the conventional meaning of words, together with the context under the guidance of CP and its maxims.

徐盛桓. 1993a. 新格莱斯会话含意理论与语用推理[J]. 外国语(1).

In Xu’s article, violation of maxims in English advertising is mentioned. It say that pragmatics is a new discipline, which studies specific words in specific context of discourse to analyze how to understand and use the language in certain context. And one of its important features is that “one can mean more than one says”. Language and words are the two factors of advertising, which helps to transmit information and promote sales. From the pragmatic perspective, advertising is the communication process between advertisers and consumer. And consumers’ acceptance is a good judge of whether the information is fully obtained. Therefore, the effective use of advertisements is closely connected with pragmatics. It also says that at present, many scholars have done research on how to achieve good advertising effect from the pragmatic perspective. Advertising in daily life, apart from Grice’s CP and conversational implicature, the article also mentioned speech act theory and relevance theory. Based on these theories, advertising language can be more striking and achieve better advertising effect.