A Study Of Grammatical Metaphor In English Advertising Language

Metaphor study can be traced back to ancient Greece. Since then, countless philosophers, litterateurs, rhetoricians and linguists have shown great interests in it. Among the various theories in this field, "grammatical metaphor" has been an academic hotspot in the past decades. Since then, many scholars home and abroad do more researches, ranging from the theoretical researches to the practical researches. The researches about the functions and applications of grammatical metaphor in a particular genre, such as science and technology discourse, news discourse, legal discourse, etc, can be found; whereas, to date, little empirical research has been done to investigate the implication of grammatical metaphor in English advertising language. This thesis attempts to explore advertising language under the frame of grammatical metaphor theories. With an aim to answer the following questions:(1) How does each type of GMs distribute in English advertising language? (2) What are their functions in English advertising language?This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one serves as an introduction, including the background, followed by the layout of this project. Chapter two will concentrate on the literature review concerning on grammatical metaphor theory. And then the thesis offers an elaboration of the features of advertisement discourses and previous study on advertising language. In chapter three, the theoretical framework will give us a detailed presentation of classification of grammatical metaphor as well as their realization, which serve as the foundation for the following discussion of advertisement discourses. Chapter four is the most important part. Firstly, one hundred pieces of short advertisement discourses will be analyzed from the perspective of grammatical metaphor theory, and the result will be present; then the functions of the grammatical metaphor in advertisement discourses will be discussed detailed. From the analysis, we can see that the employment of ideational metaphor can increase the density of advertising lexicon. The use of nominalization, adjectivilization and verbalization make the advertising language more objective and convincing. The realization of interpersonal metaphor is by the using of interrogative sentence and imperative sentence. Interrogative sentence can arouse the curiosity and attract the consumers. Imperative sentence can provide some suggestions and advices, and thus makes the consumers feel more intimate. Textual metaphor is realized through noun. The employment of textual metaphor makes the advertising language more cohesive. Chapter five concludes the summary of the thesis, with some tentative conclusions and some prospects for the further research.