A Study On The Implicature Of Metaphor In English 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 an effective way, the advertisers apply metaphors in their advertisements. The present thesis will analyze metaphors focusing on implicature in the perspective of pragmatics.The fundamental theoretical background for the study is the knowledge of metaphor and English advertising. Then, the author of the thesis discusses it in the first chapter, first about the metaphor and then the English advertising. The study of metaphor has several thousand years' history, from the time of Aristotle to present days. This long history can be roughly divided into three periods: 1) The rhetorical study of metaphor, represented by Aristotle and Quintillian, stretching from 300 B.C. to the 1930s, lasting for more than 2000 years; 2) The semantic study of metaphor from the rhetorical, philosophical and linguistic perspectives, stretching from the 1930s to the early 1970s; 3) The multidisciplinary study of metaphor, such as in the field of linguistics, psychology, philosophy, semiotics, pragmatics, etc., approximately beginning from the 1970s.It is impossible to mention all the works related to the study of metaphor. So here, the author will only discuss some of the influential theories about metaphor in these three periods: The rhetorical study of metaphor, the semantic study of metaphor and the pragmatic study of metaphor. In this thesis the author will mainly discuss it in the perspective of pragmatic study on metaphor in English ads.Two theories are relevant in understanding metaphors in advertising. One is Grice's theory of Conversational Implicature, and another is Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory. Although Grice claims that metaphor results from the deliberate violation of the maxim of quality and thus produces the conversational implicature, his theory is also under criticism: his Cooperative Principle and maxims of conversation are vague and they cannot analyze certain non-propositional lines of...