A Study Of Metaphor In Public Service Advertising Via Conceptual Blending Theory

Metaphor and public service advertising are two main topics in linguistic research and advertising study respectively. Both of them have great significance. Metaphor is an important cognitive tool as well as a common linguistic phenomenon, while public service advertising is a symbol of social civilization and plays a crucial role for the harmonious social life. Metaphor is an important strategy in PSA during its transmission of information and persuasion of action, whose aims are to cause the audience's attention, stimulate their mental association, influence their values, and thus to arouse public awareness of social problems. Because of its rhetorical function and specially expressive effect, metaphor has been widely used in PSA.Metaphor is an indispensable part in life. Study on metaphor has a long history, which can be traced back to the great philosopher Aristotle. The study involves widespread disciplines, from ancient to modern, from China to abroad, including perspectives of rhetoric, semantics, pragmatics and cognitive science. Traditional study recognizes metaphor a conventional means of rhetoric and a deviation of common language. Modern cognitive linguistics proposes that metaphor is an important cognitive tool. People learn something new or express abstract concepts through metaphorical analogy between the target domain and the source domain.Advertising plays an important role in modern life. Although advertising is a modern topic, it attracts more and more scholars. When commercial advertising promotes the economic development and consumption behaviours, public service advertising focuses on the environment, animals, natural resources, human health, women and children, social justice, moral values and other topics that are related to public interests. The popularity of public service ads has more important significance for the social development. Therefore, advertising deserves more research.Metaphor is a common language phenomenon and advertising is a special form of language as well as a communication process. Metaphorical expressions are abound in advertising. To put metaphor and advertising under the same framework of research is of great significance. Studies on advertising metaphor involves perspectives of semiotics, rhetoric, pragmatics and advertising effect. This paper carries researches from the perspective of modem cognitive linguistics, to deeply discuss the meaning construction of metaphor in PSA and its working mechanism. In this paper, the author takes the concept of integration theory by the famous American cognitive linguist Fauconnier as the theoretical framework, and studies the presentation of metaphor in PSAs. Conceptual integration theory holds that people constructs a variety of mental spaces when talk and think and those mental spaces are integrated into a blended space to generate an emergent structure. Metaphor relates to the cross-space mapping between the source and the target. By mapping, the structures from the two domains are projected electively onto the blended space. Through combination, completion and elaboration, the metaphorical meaning is generated from the emergent structure. The data collection covers PSAs both in English and Chinese that are released in the decade from 2000 to 2010. The sources are mainly from the Chinese official SPA platform-the network of Chinese public service advertising, CCTV which represents the highest level of PSA in China, and the major academic journals of advertising. Collected metaphors include both the discourse level and pictorial level. This paper analyses the space construction of PSA metaphors, their one-sided and two-sided network of cross-domain mapping, and emergent structure that contribute to the new meaning of metaphor. The paper further mentions the cultural influence on metaphor interpretation.Metaphor is an important strategy in advertising for it produces an intuitive, brief, and shocking effect for the presentation of advertising themes. Both commercial ads or public service ones are rich in metaphor. However, compared with commercial advertising, themes of public service adverting are more serious, more persuasive, without commercial purposes. Straightforward preaching does not have a strong effect to appealing, while the use of metaphor provides a shocking visual and audio impact on the audience. Metaphor borrows metaphorical analogies to make advertising subjects more prominent, more attractive to the audience, thus achieves advertising goals.The paper studies metaphor from a cognitive perspective with hopes to enrich the corpus for metaphor research, to provide more data support for the conceptual integration theory, to enable a better interpretation of metaphor in PSA, and to give some suggestions in advertisement making.