Pragmatic Study Of Metaphor In Advertising

In the modern world, advertising has penetrated into every corner of our life. To save space or time and impress the consumers most in a condensed and effective way, the advertisers apply metaphors in their advertisements. The present thesis will analyze metaphors in advertising from the perspective of the relevance theory.The relevance theory, proposed by Sperber and Wilson in 1986, tries to analyze human communication from cognition. The relevance theory holds that human communication is an ostensive-inferential process, and that by producing an ostensive stimulus, the speaker makes it manifest to the hearer that on the one hand he or she has an informative intention, to make manifest or more manifest to the hearer a set of assumptions ; on the other hand, he or she has a communicative intention, to make it mutually manifest to the hearer and himself or herself that he or she has this informative intention. The relevance theory also argues that the ostensive stimulus comes with the presumption of optimal relevance for the hearer.In this thesis, the author argues that the communication which occurs in advertising is ostensive-inferential in nature, and that metaphors in advertising are used as ostensive stimuli to attract and hold the audience's attention to the advertiser's informative intention. This thesis also tries to show how metaphors help the audience to recover the advertiser's informative intention and acquire optimal relevance.