The Effect Of Verbal Anchoring On The Processing Of Advertising Pictorial Metaphors

Promoting products through advertisements is the most effective way to lift brand recognition and add value in a limited time,which is a topic engaging an increasing number of scholars for exploration.It’s found that metaphors play a critical role in advertising studies from the linguistic perspective.Advertising metaphors make message attractive and creative,alter consumers’ beliefs and enhance purchase intention.However,there are still some unsettled arguments,such as the interaction between elements of different modalities in advertising metaphors..Guided by the relevance theory,the theory of multimodal metaphor and the conceptual integration model of multimodal theory,this thesis employed a three-part behavioral experiment to examine the interaction of verbal anchoring and pictorial metaphor with a focus on how the verbal anchoring influences the processing of advertising metaphors.The first part of the experiment aimed to study which modality can be processed in the first place.The result showed that metaphors in pictorial modality were recognized faster than those in verbal modality.In the second part of the experiment,differences were investigated between advertising pictorial metaphors with verbal anchoring and those without.The results showed that advertisements with verbal anchoring facilitated participants’ comprehending and appreciating the anchored pictorial metaphors.In the third part of the experiment,a comparison was made to identify how verbal anchoring influenced the processing of pictorial metaphors in advertising,with pictorial metaphors examined in three conditions.The results showed that advertising pictorial metaphors with literal anchoring yielded the most positive cognitive responses.Moreover,it was found that literally-anchored advertising metaphors in moderate novelty performed the best in all advertisements,both cognitively and affectively.Compared with the previous studies,this study takes advantage of novelty measurement for the analysis of pictorial metaphors,with a view to obtaining more precise results.It not only enriches the existing theoretical framework of multimodal metaphor in the context of cognitive linguistics and advertising,but also proposes an optimal match between pictorial metaphors and verbal elements for advertisers and manufactures to design effective multimodal advertisements,supporting advertisement-launching companies in the market competition.