An Analysis On The Implicature Of Metaphor In Advertising

With the development of the society, advertisements have entered into people's lives. To save space or time and impress the consumers most, advertisers begin to pay attention to the effective and strategic use of language. They may resort to different rhetorical devices, such as metaphor, pun, parallelism, irony and personification and so on. The present paper will analyze metaphor in advertising from the perspective of pragmatics.In the field of pragmatics, Grice's theory of Conversational Implicature and Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory provide us with two different perspectives to understand metaphor. Grice claims that metaphor results from the deliberate violation of the maxim of quality and thus produces the conversational implicature. He also proposes the schema to derive this implicature. Grice's logical pragmatics contributes much to the study of metaphor and human communication. But his theory is also under criticism: his Cooperative Principle and maxims of conversation are vague and they cannot analyze certain non-propositional lines of interpretation-for example by evoking images or states of mind-which are precisely characteristics of figurative utterances. To solve these problems, Sperber and Wilson put forward their Principle of Relevance. Metaphor is then treated as a kind of normal communication which can be analyzed by their single principle and a device to trigger weak implicatures, the weaker an assumption iscommunicated, the more the addressee takes responsibility for deriving it.Basing on Grice's conversational implicature and Sperber and Wilson's weak implicature, the writer of the present paper suggests the concepts of Explicit Implicature and Implicit Implicature in advertising. Explicit Implicature is that kind of implicature which can be easily understood according to people's common sense knowledge. For metaphors in advertising are usually "conventional" or "dead" ones. People are always very familiar with the vehicles and have almost the same common sense knowledge about them. When they transfer these knowledge about the vehicle to the tenor, they will get the explicit implicature of the metaphor. While in advertising, the advertiser speaks to a lot of consumers. Besides the basic popular meanings held between the advertiser and consumers, different consumers always give their different connotations of metaphor, for they may have different cultural background, religious belief, social experience and encyclopedia knowledge, etc. The writer of the present paper calls the implicature got in this way the Implicit Implicature. The present paper then tries to analyze the implicature of some of metaphorical advertisements according to these two concepts. These findings and discussions are expected to be of some help to fellow teachers and to be supplemented and amended.