Conceptual Blending And Meaning Construction In English Advertising Discourse

Advertising is a non-personal communication of information, usually paid for and persuasive in nature, about products, services or ideas through various media. The present thesis gives an analysis of advertising discourse from a cognitive point of view, highlighting the effectiveness of Conceptual Blending Theory in the explanations of readers' interpretation of advertisements.Ever since 1950s, a large body of literature has been contributed to the academy, focusing on the analyses of various patterns of texts, among which the advertising discourses have been receiving steady and growing attention. From the perspectives of semantics, pragmatics, semiotics, sociolinguistics and stylistics, substantial research work has been done in the descriptions and explanations of vocabulary, syntax, rhetoric features, advertising structures and patterns, code-switching, cohesive and coherent devices in advertising discourses. However, the former researches have never seemed sufficient enough in that it seldom goes beyond the framework of speech act theory or functional grammar. Besides, non-verbal features have been left out of consideration. This thesis will approach the advertising discourses from a cognitive point of view, giving a balanced analysis of both verbal and nonverbal features of advertising discourses.Thanks to the emergence of cognitive linguistics in 1990s, the advertising discourse analyses have attained a cognitive bearing ever since. With the development and improvement of Conceptual Blending Theory, it has been widely acknowledged as an effective tool in the analysis of the hidden mechanism involved in the interpretation of meaning in advertising discourses. This thesis will apply Conceptual Blending Theory into the analysis of meaning construction in advertising discourse, with due attention paid to the underlying cognitive mechanism of the meaning construction during the process of comprehension of adverting discourses.This thesis aims to view the advertising English as a type of discourse, taking text as well as context into account. It recognizes image as a variable of the context, arguing that Conceptual Blending Theory plays an important role in the interpretation of the process of readers' comprehension of advertisements. Based on the data collected, this thesis has achieved three tentative conclusions: 1) conceptual blending is an effective tool in the explanation of interpretation and meaning construction; 2) in advertising discourse, the interpretation of Adjective + Noun structure, compound structure, simple sentence, conceptual metaphors, conceptual metonymies and visual metaphors involve conceptual blending in the process of meaning construction; 3) the Simplex, Mirror and Simple-scope network are more often involved than Double-scope network or Multiple-scope network to ensure least effort in the process of advertising interpretation, which also correlates with the features that advertising discourses shall be dealt with in working memory in a comparatively short time.