A Contrastive Study Of Metaphors In English And Chinese Advertising Discourses

Metaphor studies have always been a hot topic of linguistics. Traditional views regard metaphor as a linguistic phenomenon and a kind of rhetoric. 1980 witnessed a cognitive turn in metaphor studies with George Lakoff & Mark Johnson's masterpiece Metaphors We Live By. Metaphor is not only a linguistic phenomenon but also a way of cognition. It is a kind of cognitive activities that employs the human's experience in some domain to explain or understand the other domain. Advertising plays a significant role in our daily life and communication. People's thinking mode and behavior are unconsciously influenced by the conceptual metaphor language in advertising, which maps parts of the characteristics to emphasize the products'advantages. All these cognitive functions conceptual metaphors present are consistent with advertisements in that they inform customers the features of products and promote the purchase. As a necessary part of advertising, metaphor language is helpful to recognize products'features.The study of advertising discourses is not much, in spite of many aspects of researches. So far, a great achievement has been done by Professor Huang Guowen from Sun Yat-sen University, who explores advertising discourses from the perspective of systematic functional grammar. In addition, other scholars have carried on the study of metaphor in English advertising. However, the study of advertising both in English and in Chinese has seldom made. Not to mention the thesis or works concerning conceptual metaphor theory into the contrastive study in both English and Chinese advertising discourses. Hopefully, this research is to help contrastive studies of English and Chinese, translation and advertising transmission.This thesis randomly collects the English and Chinese advertising discourses from Business Week and Business Week (China). By qualitative and quantitative analysis, we have got the following findings: 1) There are similar conceptual metaphors in English and Chinese advertising discourses, that is, human being metaphor, plant metaphor, animal metaphor, journey metaphor, war metaphor, game/ sport metaphor, building metaphor, container metaphor, stage metaphor, nature metaphor and machine metaphor. 2) The analysis shows that the frequencies and occurrences of metaphorical meaning in English and Chinese advertising discourses are more similar than different. 3) Journey metaphor has the highest frequencies and occurrences in the collected data, especially in English advertising discourses.The thesis further provides evidence for supporting the systematicity, pervasiveness and cultural coherence of conceptual metaphor theory after discussing the similarities and differences of metaphors in English and Chinese advertising discourses. In addition, the causes are discussed. To be precise, the similarities are that we have common cognitive experience and similar image schema as human beings; and the differences are caused by the different cultural factors inflected by language cognition with closely related language and culture.