Pragmatic Presuppositions in Chinese Skin-Whitening Advertisements

Abstract

Advertisements are used as a tool to build the communication bridge between producers and consumers, utilising cultural values and traditions. Applying presuppositions in advertisements helps to convey a message in a short and memorable way. While several pragmatic studies explored English advertisements and pragmatic presuppositions and triggers have been studied in countries like U.S.A, Malaysia, and Indonesia, no study addressed the presuppositions and triggers in skin-whitening advertisements in China. Thus, this study employed a mixed method, quantitative and qualitative designs, to investigate the pragmatic presuppositions and pragmatic presupposition triggers, and to identify the advertisers’ preference of pragmatic presupposition(s) and trigger(s) in the advertisements. The corpus was 34 print skin-whitening advertisements form Ray Li magazine, published in China from January to December 2017. After data collection, the advertisements were translated by an official translation agency in China. Yule’s (1996) six types of pragmatic presuppositions and Valeika and Verikaite’s (2010) ten types of triggers were used as data analysis framework. The findings revealed that all six types of pragmatic presuppositions, and only seven types of triggers were used in the advertisements. ‘Factive’ pragmatic presupposition, and ‘referring phrases’ of triggers were the most preferred types. The findings of this study may benefit advertisers to produce more language-effective advertisements in the very competitive Chinese market of women’s products. English language instructors and students could use this study to teach/learn about effective persuasive speech strategies in the advertisements. This study could raise awareness among consumers in analyzing the information about products. Future researchers are recommended to conduct similar studies on beauty advertisements in other languages and among other Asian countries, such as Korea and Japan, which have high consumption of beauty products.