TYPES AND ROLES OF PRESUPPOSITIONAL MEANINGS IN ADVERTISING PERSUASION
TYPES AND ROLES OF PRESUPPOSITIONAL MEANINGS IN ADVERTISING PERSUASION

Summary/Abstract: Stacking of presuppositions is a sedulously exploited semantic device in advertising. However, a careful selection of presuppositional meanings is hypothesized due to their presence in the logical form (LF) and their non-cancellable, determinate and context-free character. We present the basic types of presuppositions in a contrastive Romanian and English corpus of print advertisements, and demonstrate that: 1) advertisers are aware of the risk of using non-cancellable inferences for making contestable claims, 2) presuppositional load is controlled, even selected due to the advertisers’ liability to substantiate it, 3) it is usually flattering assumptions about the reader and/or product that are assumed by the advertiser to be believed by the reader to be true.

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