Abstract

The commercial advertising is one of the crucial means to compete in the increasingly fierce market. The English commercial advertisement is laconic and vivid, and its forceful persuasion can exert an influence on people’s values, possessing extremely explicit material objectives. With the view of strengthening the advertiser’s awareness of the accurate understanding and use of hedges and enhancing the ability of effective speech communication in advertisements, this paper, based on Grice’s Cooperative principle, analyzes the use of hedges in English commercial advertisements from two aspects: abidance and violation. What is found is that advertisers are required to employ the hedges appropriately in terms of the characteristics of the products, and flexibly comply with or violate the cooperative principle to achieve their advertising purposes and highlight products ‘features.

Keywords: hedges, the cooperative principle, advertisements

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