A Cognitive Approach To Metaphors In English Advertisements

Nowadays, advertising has been following us here and there. As a media of communicating information and a tool of promoting goods, advertising has fully developed and is growing prosperously. It is generally thought by the advertisers that metaphorical advertising will help convince the consumers to have a good impression on the goods and help to arouse their desire to buy the goods.In recent years, especially in the last decades of the 20th century (starting with late1960), it testified a great revival of the interest in the research of the metaphor. A lot of philosophers, linguists, cognitive scientists, and scholars in other domains have been studying hard to comprehend metaphor in general details. One important genre of contemporary theory of metaphor, which is acquiring interesting support from academicians studying in many subjects, is the conceptual metaphor theory. It is the linguist George Lakoff with philosopher Mark Jonson (1980) who first put forward its key features. The definition of metaphor is as the perception of one thing as another. In a cognitive view, metaphor can be divided into three types: structural metaphor, orientational metaphor and ontological metaphor. This theory provides us with a new angle and approach to study metaphors in advertising.According to the cognitive approach of Lakoff and Jonson'experiential view, this paper adopts a qualitative method to analyze the three types of metaphors in advertising and study their bodily experiential basis and their functions in advertising. It is hoped that it will give a cognitive explanation to the application and understanding for metaphors in advertising and simultaneously provide the cognitive linguistics with authentic linguistics data in advertising and arguments for the cognitive explanation to metaphors.This paper first gives a brief introduction to the conceptual metaphor theory, and then puts this theory into the analysis of English advertising. It mainly emphasizes on the analysis of these three types of conceptual metaphors used in English advertisements and on the cognitive function of conceptual metaphors in English advertisements examples. Through this study the paper wants to find out how the conceptual metaphor transmits the main selling idea to the customers, thus helps the English learners better understand English advertisements. By analyzing the metaphors in advertisements the author concludes that the different functions of conceptual metaphors are basically in accordance with the basic functions of advertising and different types of conceptual metaphors serves respectively as the cognitive basis for the functions of advertising.With the course of globalization, more and more English advertisements come to the sights of Chinese consumers. It is very important for them, especially for the English learners to learn and fully comprehend English advertisements. Thus the author hopes that this thesis will be helpful for people to comprehend various ads.