A Cognitive Approach To The Meaning Construction Of Metaphors In Advertising

Metaphor is a pervasive phenomenon in our life. As an important part of modern life, advertising inevitably uses a great number of metaphors. And metaphorical advertising has its own particularity. Therefore, a deep study on metaphors in advertising can not only help us deepen our cognition and understanding of the expressing forms of advertising art, comprehend the particularity of metaphors in advertising, but also can facilitate our understanding of the modern world, promote our comprehension of experience, thinking and expressing forms.Scholars have made different studies on metaphors in advertising from different perspectives. These studies mainly focus on the social communication functions, symbolism, social adaptation of metaphors in advertising, and their influence on consumer behaviors. These studies, which lay a solid foundation for this thesis, show that it is of great importance to do research on metaphors in advertising. However, these studies lack a very deep understanding of metaphors in advertising, a cognitive study on the particularity of metaphors in advertising in particular. This thesis is just an attempt to probe into the meaning construction of metaphors in advertising from the cognitive approach.The Conceptual Blending Theory provides us with a solid theoretical foundation for us to understand the cognitive mechanism of metaphors. Wang (2004) modifies Fauconnier's CBT model and makes it more powerful in explaining the meaning construction of metaphors in advertising. Based on Wang's modified Conceptual Blending Theory, the thesis illustrates in detail the meaning construction of metaphors in advertising according to the four blending networks--the simplex network, the mirror network, the single-scope network, and the double-scope network. Based on the understanding that people's cognitive self-motivation, the abstraction of synthetic conceptual similarity and the inference of conceptual omission will influence the meaning construction process of metaphors in advertising, this thesis has found that some metaphorical advertisements contain more than one blending networks. Such advertisements cannot be analyzed within only one blending network. Therefore, sometimes two blending networks have to be combined together to give a more satisfactory interpretation. In the metaphorical mapping, people usually understand the abstract concept by means of concrete object. But sometimes they use imaginative abstract concept to understand the concrete concept. Meanwhile, in the process of analyzing the meaning construction of metaphors in advertising, we have reached some particularity of metaphors in advertising contexts.This thesis consists of five chapters: Chapter One is a general introduction to provide the rationale, objectives, methodology and layout of the thesis. Chapter Two briefly introduces the different theoretical views on the study of metaphor and metaphor studies in advertising, and presents the limitations of the previous studies. Chapter Three begins with the discussion of Conceptual Blending Theory. Within the theoretical framework, the network model and the sub-networks of Conceptual Blending Theory are introduced firstly. Then the defects of CBT are presented and a modified framework for the study of the meaning construction of metaphors in advertising is to be put forward. In Chapter Four we apply the four types of conceptual blending networks in particular to the case analysis of metaphors in advertising. Chapter Five is the concluding remarks concerning the summary, major findings, limitations of the thesis and suggestions for the further research.