ABSTRACT
This chapter explores potential fraud in Chinese advertising, covering the pragmalinguistic devices used in fraud and the consumer psychology exploited. Based on existing research and combined with some first-hand data, it conducts a multi-level discussion on the practice of deception in advertising language with the aim of raising consumer awareness, thereby enhancing self-protection and improving the consumer’s ability to identify the “pragmatic traps” used by advertisers. The so-called “pragmatic traps” exposed in the chapter include the “deictic trap", the “presuppositional trap”, the “implicature trap”, the “elliptical trap”, the “ambiguity trap”, the “fuzziness trap”, the “politeness trap”, and the “multimodal trap”. Each trap involves the use of some pragmalinguistic device to make misunderstanding and thus deception possible.
