A CIT-based Study Of The Interpretation Of Commercial Advertisements

Advertising is a complex process involved with the spread of product information, the interpretation of advertisements and the purpose in persuading the consumers. An excellent advertisement owes to the effective and prompt activation of consumers' mental imagination to the product, which can successfully stimulate consumers' desire of purchase by indirect persuasion. Therefore, how the advertisers explicitly and artistically express their works and how the consumers smoothly interpret them will count much.This thesis aims at exploring the internal cognitive mechanism in the process of interpreting commercial advertisements with reference to Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner's (2002) conceptual integration theory (also called conceptual blending theory), which is based on and evolved from the mental space theory first advanced by Fauconnier early in his book Mental Space:Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language in the 1985. Conceptual integration theory (short for CIT) and its conceptual networks are considered to be powerful in its cognitive force which may illustrate the whole iceberg from the tip of the on-line meaning construction.This thesis contains five chapters:for the first chapter, the Introduction foreshadows what comes after, in which the reason for choosing the topic is stated, the focus and primary methods of this research are identified, and a general framework is presented as a guide of the whole thesis. Chapter two is the starting point of the research as it shows a literature review related to the study of commercial advertisements in four approaches and in turn reveals the limitations of the previous study. Chapter three illustrates a detailed description of conceptual integration theory including its primary theoretic basis, namely, mental space theory. The general idea of the integration theory, some of its basic concepts, its three operational principles, the conceptual integration process, optimality principles and its four integration network models are made explicit in this chapter. Chapter four mainly relates the corpus of selected commercial advertisements to the four respective types of models and reinterprets them from the perspective of conceptual integration theory. Chapter five is the closing of this thesis in which some conclusions are drawn, suggestions are advanced and future tasks are suggested.