Today, advertisements can greatly influence people’s consumption behavior. To arouse consumers’ purchasing desire, some merchants produce appealing advertising language that may help them achieve their prospection of promoting products greatly. Many scholars have dug into TV commercials from various perspectives, such as, acoustics, visual effects, and discourse analysis. Compared with other perspectives, there is few analysis concerning the application of Cooperative Principle (CP) in TV commercials. Based on the theory of CP, this thesis adopts qualitative research method and investigates whether the advertising language in Chinese food TV commercials observes or flouts the maxims of CP and what effect it may achieve. This thesis is expected to shed light on the writing of advertisement copies for Chinese food TV commercials and increase the pragmatic awareness of the advertising copywriters. Meanwhile, consumers can better infer the implicature in Chinese food TV commercials and avoid being deceived by some advertising language.
Keywords: Chinese food TV commercials; cooperative principle; conversational implicature
