Abstract:Advertising is a common means in modern society to give information, mostly to promote products and services. The language used in advertising is full of various pragmatic strategies. Based on Grice’s (1975) cooperative principle and the related four maxims, this paper analyzes how violation of these principles produces various implicatures by looking at some examples of advertisements. It is proposed that violation of various maxims can help increase the decoding difficulty, extend the decoding time, raise the decoding appeal, lengthen the attentive time and thus, add charm to the advertisement.

Key words: English advertising; conversational implicature; cooperative principle

CONTENTS

Abstract

中文摘要

1. Introduction..1

2. Grice: Cooperative Principle and Conversational Implicature Theory1

3. Advertising and advertising language..2

3.1 Definitions of advertising language

3.2 Functions of advertising language

3.3 Features of advertising language

4. Application of Conversational Implicature in Advertisement.4

4.1 Flouting the Maxim of Quantity

4.2 Flouting the Maxim of Quality

4.3 Flouting the Maxim of Relation 

4.4 Flouting the Maxim of Manner

5. Conclusion7

Bibliography.8

Acknowledgements..9