Comparative Study Of Conceptual Metaphor In Advertising Slogans

The last decades of the 20th century (starting with late 1960's) witnessed a significant revival of the interest in the study of metaphor. Many philosophers, linguists, cognitive scientists, and scholars in other fields recently have been working to understand metaphor in greater detail. One major stream of contemporary theory of metaphor, which is gaining increasing support from scholars working in several disciplines, is the conceptual metaphor theory. Its major features were first worked out by linguist George Lakoff with philosopher Mark Johnson (1980). Metaphor is essentially defined as the perception of one thing as another.The conceptual view argues: (1) Metaphor is primarily a matter of thought and only derivatively a matter of language (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). It is omnipresent in language and thought. (2) Metaphors are embodied. Although these conceptual metaphor claims are meant to be true, the evidence supporting it is mainly derived from English. And most researches of conceptual metaphor have focused on everyday communication and poetry. Few have investigated conceptual metaphors in advertising. Moreover, scholars (Lakoff& Johnson, 1999; Yu, 2000,2001, 2003) have indicated there is a relationship between language, culture, body and cognition. However, the prior theoretical attention has focused on the relation between body, language and cognition, leaving quite a remarkable gap in knowledge about cultural aspects. One of the framing ideas of this thesis is that, besides cognitive aspects a thorough analysis of conceptual metaphor should necessarily include the cultural aspects. Therefore, the writer attempts to adopt a cognitive view to figure out the cultural influence on conceptual metaphor through a comparative study of English and Chinese auto slogans. Dimensions of cultural value orientations would be used to explain the difference of metaphor use in the collected auto slogans. Since metaphor functions as an access to the understanding of language and culture, it is also hoped that this study would throw some light on the metaphor teaching in ESL.A content analysis of 418 advertising slogans (200 English slogans and 218 Chinese slogans) was conducted. There are five chapters in this thesis. Chapter one is a general introduction. Chapter two discusses the most important contributions to the literature of the field, which served as the underlying theoretical background for this thesis. Research questions will be proposed in this chapter. Chapter three provides a description of research method. Chapter four then presents a detailed discussion of the data based on the established framework. And finally, the conclusions, implications and limitations of this study will be provided in Chapter five.The results indicate that conceptual metaphor claims hold true in the collected data, as metaphors are pervasive and most of them are universally embodied. Meanwhile, culture does influence metaphor use in advertising slogans. The writer has identified three dimensions of cultural values which result in the main difference in the metaphor use in the collected data. These dimensions are contextuality, human relationship with nature and time Orientation.