Presupposition Analysis in Advertising Language

Nov. 2005, Volume 2, No.11 (Serial No.23) Sino-US English Teaching, ISSN1539-8072,USA

Presupposition Analysis in Advertising Language
Feng Li* Wuhan University
Abstract: In modern society, advertising plays a very important role in people’
s daily life. We can not
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 commonly shared resources of language. The
use of presupposition in advertising language, which is an important topic in pragmatics, can serve the function
fairly well.
This paper first presents a general review of previous studies on presupposition phenomena in advertising
language, then investigates the use of presuppositions in advertising language by both qualitative and quantitative
analyses. By qualit ative analysis, the author tries to explore the functions of each type of presuppositions in
advertising texts; by quantitative analysis, 100 sentences selected from various advertisements for different
products are examined.
Key words: presupposition Relevance Theory advertisement advertising language
1. Introduction
1.1 Background information
Advertising is an inescapable part of modern life --- on television, radio, or Internet, and in newspapers and
magazines, on streets and buses and even on mobile phones. It is no exaggeration to say 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 purchase 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, however, via presupposition. Therefore, advertisers frequently use presuppositions in language
to help advertising to realize its functions.
1.2 Previous studies
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; more importantly, he does
not give a systematic and comprehensive analysis of concrete functions of presupposition in advertising.

* Feng Li, female, postgraduate of College of Foreign Languages and Literature, Wuhan University; Research field: applied linguistics;
Address: College of Foreign Languages and Literature, Wuhan University, Hubei Province, P. R. China; Postcode: 430072.
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Presupposition Analysis in Advertising Language
Therefore, further work on presuppositions in advertising is needed.
On the basis of this, this paper tries to give a systematic and comprehensive analysis of presupposition
phenomena in English advertisements, types of presupposition realization and functions or roles played by
presuppositions in this field, and use certain appropriate theories to interpret the results of analysis.
2. Approaches to Presupposition
Linguists’

interest in presupposition rises from their study on semantic relation. Keenan (1971) holds that
there are two distinct kinds of presupposition in natural languages, semantic presupposition and pragmatic
presupposition. From 1973 onwards 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.
Rather, 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 presupposition is 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 or common ground (joint assumption) 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 the listener because the speaker believes that the listener can understand what he or
she says.
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 the following types: existential presupposition, factive presupposition, and highly context-bound
presupposition.
Existential presupposition 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, demonstrative pronoun and possessives. 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 gearing the consumer’
s attention towards 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 an 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.

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Presupposition Analysis in Advertising Language
Factive presupposition is another type of presuppositions, which can be triggered both lexically and
syntactically. Just as the proverb 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 phrase “fault
that P” is presuppositional, with respect to P. Presuppositions hold constant under the Negation Test. 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.
Highly context-bound pragmatic presuppositions here refer to those which are much more sensitive to the
contexts and much more subjective than the above-mentioned 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 for 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, survival under negation or question 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. A Quantitative Analysis of Presuppositions in Advertisements
After the analysis of the classification and functions of presuppositions in advertising language, the author
will focus in this part on the quantitative analysis of presupposition in advertisements.
100 advertising sentences for different products are chosen for analysis. These advertising sentences are
selected from different sources, magazines, newspapers, Internet, etc. During the analysis, the author calculated
the occurrences and percentage of each type of presupposition.
Table 1 The distribution of different types of presuppositions in advertising language
Sentence
Number
Percentage(%)
Presupposition
Existential
65
65
Factive
10
10
State
3
3
Belief
2
2
Behavior
3
3
Unidentifiable
2
2
Total
85
85
As we can see from the table, presupposition exists in 85% of the whole 100 selected advertising sentences.
In addition, existential presupposition accounts for the largest percentage --- 65%. That is, advertisers frequently
use definite description to trigger existential presuppositions, to serve for the concision of advertising language.
Factive presupposition is the second most often-used presupposition among the selected material. Facts speak
louder than words. Factive presupposition can make the advertisement more persuasive in a subtle way although
the facts are only presupposed (to be true). Syntactical devices are used as a major means to trigger this type of
presuppositions to save the consumers’

processing efforts.
Other types of presuppositions take up only a relatively small part. This does not mean they are not so
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Presupposition Analysis in Advertising Language
effective as the existential presuppositions and the factive presuppositions. Their roles cannot be neglected.
5. Conclusion
Based on both the qualitative and quantitative analyses, the following conclusions can be made. First,
presupposition can serve for the advertising language and is now extensively used in various advertisements.
However, statistical analysis shows that existential presuppositions and factive presuppositions are the most
frequently used types to guarantee the smooth and concise development of advertisements. Second, the features of
presupposition can help to accomplish the purpose of advertising, to improve the persuasiveness and
attractiveness of the advertisement.

References:
1. Goddard, A. The Language of Advertising. London and New York: Routledge. 1998.
2. Leech, G. N. English in Advertising[M]. London: Longman, 1996.
3. Peccei, J. S. Pragmatics. London and New York: Routledge. 1999.
4. Sperber, D.& Wilson, D. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Padstow: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1995.
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(Edited by Xiao Li, Qi Shang, Nina Liu and Iris)


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