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1. Theories of Pragmatics
This research uses a pragmatic approach to analyze the English slogan in mobile phone advertisements. The focus of a pragmatic analysis is on the meaning
of a speaker’s utterances rather than on the meaning of words or sentences. There are some definitions which proposed by linguists regarding to pragmatics.
Levinson 1983 states that “pragmatics covers both context-dependent aspects of language structure and principles of language usage and understanding that have
nothing or title to do with linguistic structure” p.9. Further, he defines pragmatics as “the study of relations between language and context that are
grammatically, or encoded in the structure of a language” p.10. In other words, pragmatics covers language usage as the basic concept in understanding language
itself within contexts. The focus of pragmatics is how a speaker uses language to convey the information. It concentrates on the aspects of meanings that cannot be
predicted by linguistic knowledge alone. Besides, Leech 1992 mentions, “pragmatics is the study of how language
is used to communicate” p.19. It concerns itself by how people use language within context and why they use language in particular ways. This implies that
pragmatics focuses on how a speaker uses language for communication to convey meaning in particular contexts. In other words, pragmatics tends to fill the gap
between the theoretical and the functional use of language. Whereas, Thomas 1995 states that pragmatics is the study about the
relation between language and context that are the basics to an account of language understanding p.21. It means that the language and its context are
14 related to the consumer’s understanding of a meaning, especially in understanding
the advertisement language. Yule 1996 states that pragmatics is the study about relationship between the linguistic forms and the uses of those forms p.4. In an
advertisement, people can find many slogans that draw the attention of the consumers. In the advertisement, a slogan is the speaker and a consumer is the
hearer. A slogan contains powerful words that make the consumer to understand the meaning of the advertisement’s goal.
The study of pragmatics concerns a number of principles. There are five principles or scopes of pragmatics. Yule 1996 suggests the principles of
pragmatics being Deixis, Presupposition, Entailment, Speech Act, and Implicature p.9. In this research, the researcher only uses two of the aforementioned
principles. Those are speech act and implicature which will be used to analyze the English slogan in mobile phone advertisements.
2. Speech Act
Communication is not just a matter of the language use. Yule 1996 defines that speech acts are simply things people do through language or actions
performed via utterances p.16. It means that speech acts cannot be separated from the speaker’s intention to utter something as they determine what the speaker
means. The speaker needs to perform, to act, and to say something. Further, Searle 1987 states that speech acts consists of three things, namely an act of saying
something, act of doing something, and act of affecting someone p.22. It can be said that language is not only used to inform or describe things, but also used to
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