Metaphors In Advertising: From A Cognitive View

The advertising is communication of information through varied media, which aims at "persuasion" to trigger off addressees' desire and action to consume the product. As the carrier of the communication of information, advertising language is indispensable in advertising. This thesis analyzes metaphors in advertising language from a cognitive approach.Different from the traditional linguistics which views metaphor as a means of rhetoric, cognitive linguistics holds that metaphor, instead of being a deviant phenomenon of normal language, is a way of thought and a powerful tool of cognition. In Lakoff & Johnson's book of Metaphors We Live By, they claim that "metaphor is primarily a matter of thought and action, and only derivatively a matter of language". This means that metaphors are not just a way of expressing ideas by means of language, but a way of perceiving, thinking and acting.According to the cognitive approach of Lakoff & Johnson's experiential view, this thesis adopts a qualitative method to categorize and analyze the metaphors in advertising and discuss their bodily experiential basis and their role in advertising. It is hoped that it will propose a cognitive explanation to the application and understanding for metaphors in advertising and at the same time provide the cognitive linguistics with authentic linguistic data in advertising and evidences for the cognitive explanation to metaphors. Through analysis, the author holds that the different functions of conceptual metaphors are basically in accordance with the basic functions of advertising and different type of conceptual metaphors serves respectively as the cognitive basis for the functions of advertising. Due to the length of the thesis, there exist some limitations, and the author proposes accordingly the efforts for future research.