Conceptual Integration And English Commercial Advertisements

Commercial advertising plays a very important role in modern society, the ultimate aim of which is to persuade the audience to purchase the products advertised. This thesis tentatively adopts a cognitive approach to English commercial advertisements with the framework of Conceptual Integration Theory, trying to disclose where the creativity of advertising language comes from and how the audience are involved in the mental cognitive meaning construction and produce the purchase desires.Linguists have shown great interest in advertising discourse. In the beginning they mainly show their concern on the manifested linguistic features. Later they turn to semiotics, semantics and pragmatics, attaching particular importance to the linguistic strategies intentionally employed by the advertisers. Admittedly they have made great contributions to the study of advertising discourse, but they fail to take the psychology of the consumers into account. As information receivers, what kind of cognitive mechanism facilitates their interpretation of the hidden meaning masked with language?With the development of cognitive researches on advertising discourse, we find that Conceptual Integration Theory proposed by Fauconnier and Turner could offer the most exciting possibilities for exploring the hidden cognitive mechanism involved in the interpretation of advertising language. Conceptual integration has complete networks, which function independently according to a set of uniform structural and dynamic principles. The basic operation comprises four mental spaces: two input spaces, one generic space and one blended space. In blending, structures from input spaces are selectively projected to a separate "blended space". Through composition, completion and elaboration, the blend develops structures that are not provided by the inputs. Inferences produced in the blend can have an effect on the cognition, leading the consumers to reason towards a commercial choice.The whole thesis is made up of five parts. Chapter 1 presents a brief introductionto the general framework of the study. Then a historical review of previous linguistic studies on advertising discourse is demonstrated in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 offers an exposition of Conceptual Integration Theory, four prototypical networks and an exemplary application. Chapter 4 is the core of the whole thesis. A case study involving semantic composition, syntactic structure, counterfactual, discourse and picture is elaborated concerning the English commercial advertisements, which provides us with a deep cognitive understanding of the design strategies employed by the advertisers and discloses the hidden mental mechanism unconsciously employed by the consumers. The integration of different cognitive fields evokes great imagination of the consumers, develops the "emergent meaning" and further activates their emotional and psychological purchase desires. The last chapter is a summary, followed by some inspirations for future researches.