The Cognitive Mechanism Of Interpretation Of Parody In Advertising

Parody, as a rhetorical device with a long history, receives much attention from rhetorical perspective. In recent years, parody is widely used in both verbal conversation and literary works and we can easily find parodies whether reading newspaper, or watching television and even when we walk in the street. In particular, the application of parody in advertising is most popular and typical, which arouses great interest of linguists.Advertising is essentially a communicative activity between the advertiser and its audience. Obviously, parody in advertising is more a cognitive method than a rhetorical device, whose interpretation is a dynamic process requiring psychologically inferential operating. It has no doubt that parody has a keen influence of human communication and it reflects the way of thinking of human beings. Therefore, there are an increasing number of linguists studying parody from the perspectives of pragmatics and cognitive linguistics, trying to reveal the working mechanism and pragmatic functions of parody. Although these previous studies have made a great contribution to contemporary linguistics, there still exist some questions and drawbacks.This thesis, based on the Relevance theory and Conceptual blending theory, discusses the interpretation of parody and its inferential mechanism from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics by analyzing the Chinese and English parodic advertisements. Parody relies on relevance finding and conceptual blending, because it is the result of imitation and creation between two concepts which definitely have something in common. Advertiser usually selects idioms, proverbs, old sayings, famous remarks, etc, which are related to the advertised object as a source expression and then creates a new expression (parodic expression) by imitating the source. The audience should try to find the source expression which is manifested to him, and make assumptions according to the meaning of the source expression, the meaning of the parodying expression, the information of the advertised object and other information of the context by blending these concepts together. Through continual conceptual blending, the audience will infer the meaning and the implicature of the parody when he finally finds the optimal relevance to the cognitive environment, and thus understanding the intention of the advertiser and appreciating the pragmatic effects of the parody. The success of this inferential process is determined by the audience's cognitive environment and their cognitive efforts including context extension and the search for optimal relevance. Only when the audience is aware of the source expression and the advertised object and he also make efforts to extend the context and find the optimal relevance, can he understand the implicature, as well as the pragmatic effects of the parody.The two major cognitive theories, the Relevance theory and Conceptual blending theory, are complementary to each other, for the relevance theory gives a reasonable bases for the blending of those separate concepts while the conceptual blending theory makes up for the vagueness of the inferential process in the relevance theory. The combination of these two theories provides a stronger theoretical foundation for the interpretation of parody in advertising and enriches, to some extent, the explanatory power of them. Besides, this thesis also has theoretically instructing significance for both advertisers and the audience to help them have a better application and understanding of parody.