Presupposition in Advertising Language

Abstract. In modern society, advertising plays a very important role in people’s 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 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 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 information

Advertising is an indispensable part of modern life – on television, radio, or Internet, and in newspapers and magazines, on 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.

Advertisements are constructed to have the primary effect of selling products or services to the consumers. Advertisers use every possible means to catch people’s attention and persuade them to buy the advertised products. In order to serve their purposes, they cannot afford to neglect the role of language 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, advertisers 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 Peccei’s book Pragmatics (1999), she suggests doing some exploration in this respect by giving one example to illustrate the importance of presuppositions in advertising English. In The Language of Advertising (1998), Goddard points out briefly that presuppositions play an important role in English advertisements.

Chen (1998) gives an account of the pragmatic presuppositions in Chinese advertisements. In his article, 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 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, let’s see an example, (1) Mary’s children have slept. (2) Mary has children. In the 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 Mary’s children have done. From pragmatic point of view, we can say (1) presupposes (2) From the sentences above we can see that, given two sentences a and b, whenever 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. Keenan (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 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 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 speech act. Last, some linguists regard pragmatic presupposition as the mutual knowledge between the speaker and the 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: presupposition 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, which is based on linguistic structure through logic concept, semantic, context and so on, as a prerequisite to infer the intended meaning. E.g. Mary’s dog is cute. Its semantic presupposition is Mary has a dog. Tell Mary I am at lunch. Its pragmatic presupposition is the speaker’s a series of assumptions: 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 and pragmatic presupposition is often used in advertisement in order to convey more persuasive information through concise words. 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 heartburn). 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 private doctor who knows something about Prilosec. This advertisement’s pragmatic presupposition is the audience’s 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 sentences 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 service’s goodness. Example 2, its semantic presupposition is self-evident: 3 out of 4 adults don’t 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 above, we see that some pragmatic presuppositions are inferred 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; doctor’s words are believable. Example 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 their 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 social 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 presupposition, 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, sexy young fragrance—advertisement 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 beer—advertisement for beer, which presupposes we have a triangle). According 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 consumer’s processing efforts while stimulate the consumer’s attention to focus on the most relevant information in the advertisement. Let’s see an example. “You’ll 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 successfully made assertions about his products in an indirect way, which can subtly influence 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 that 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 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 because 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 soap 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 ours, which presupposes we have a house), spilt sentence, time adverbial clause (e.g. After his father died, he stepped 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 condition, 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 consumer’s concern. How can healthy choice have less fat and more taste? The characteristics of healthy choice—less 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 implicit concept through definite words. Just as the old saying goes, “facts speak louder than words.” It is very necessary to present factual information in order to change the consumers’ attitudes or behaviors. The following example involves obviously a typical factive presupposition. “I used to think it was my fault that Windows didn’t work properly”. The words do not directly assert that Windows does not work properly, but they presuppose this. The advertiser has indirectly imparted the information that the products of Apple Company are superior to those of Microsoft in terms of quality.

3.4 Non-factive presupposition

It is relative to verb vocabulary, such as dream; the information after is often untrue, so these kinds of verbs are called non-factive verbs. E.g. I dreamed I was rich, we can see that the situation after dream is not true, just imagination. In fact I am not rich at all. What is color of your teeth? -Advertisement for toothpaste. Teeth’s color is actually white, and this is common sense. But through the question, we realize that there are other colors of the teeth. Some people’s teeth become yellow, black due to their bad life habits. Therefore, it is the toothpaste’s advantage--using it, your teeth will keep fresh and white.

3.5 Highly context-bound pragmatic presuppositions

It refers to those which are much more sensitive to the contexts and much more subjective than existential and factive presuppositions. In this part presuppositions are preferably treated as background belief, relation to an utterance that must be mutually known or assumed by the speaker and addressee fore the utterance to be considered appropriate in specific context. These presuppositions can be further classified into three types since emotions, attitudes, beliefs and behaviors all can be used directly or indirectly through presuppositions to play their parts effectively in the advertisements.

Although presuppositions can be classified into different types, they share some common features such as subjectivity, variety, and being implicit. For example, the feature of variety means presuppositions can avoid monotony and dullness by adopting different presupposition triggers, either lexical or syntactical, to sustain the consumers’ attention for a longer time.

4. Conclusion

Advertisement directly influences the products’ sales volumes and economic interest. As a result, a large sum of money is spent on advertisement. It is really difficult to inform attract and stimulate the consumers through several sentences to buy their products and goods without violating the advertisement law. Apart from novelty in lexical words, conciseness in grammatical sentences, we also place emphasis on presupposition, which not only enlarge information but also appeal to the consumer to make rational inference avoid the troubles by direct assertion.

References

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