A Cognitive Approach To Metaphors In Advertising

In the modern society, advertising has penetrated into every corner of our lives. As a means of information communication and an approach of promotion, advertising has fully developed and is growing vigorously. Advertisers generally believe that metaphorical advertising can help persuade audience to have a favorable impression on the products and help to bring about their desire to purchase the products.Different from the traditional point of view, cognitive linguists with Lakoff as the representative put forward Conceptual Metaphor Theory, regarding metaphor as a cognitive device to understand and construct our mind rather than merely a kind of figure of speech. This theory provides us with a new perspective and approach to observe and examine metaphors in advertising.With an overview of the researches on metaphors in advertising, we find that metaphor was still seen as a rhetorical phenomenon. Even there was occasion when metaphor was considered to be a cognitive device; there was no sufficient statistic and corpora to prove the viewpoint.Our present study starts from cognitive perspective and explores metaphors in advertising in a systemic way under the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory posed by Lakoff, hoping to have a closer look at the strategy of advertisers in selecting conceptual metaphors. The corpora in our study come from BusinessWeek (English version). We identify, classify and categorize conceptual metaphors according to the definition Lakoff gave, and bring about a chart giving a general picture of all the conceptual metaphors appear in the study. From this chart, we discover that the source domains enjoy the most popularity of the advertisers are ANIMATED THINGS, JOURNEY, CONSTRUCTION, SPORTS OR GAMES, and WAR OR FIGHTING.Based on the general analysis of the corpora, we go deep into the exploration and have a systemic case study on two source domains with the most occurrence number, i.e., ANIMATED THINGS and JOURNEY, respectively. We examine the characteristics of each source domain and the features that get highlighted. Then we make a comparative study on the conceptual metaphors that share the same source domain. And the final results we attain prove the fundamental key concepts of Conceptual Metaphor Theory: (1) conceptual metaphor is experientially based. The physical touch with the outer world and experience of human beings play an important role in understanding metaphors in advertising; (2) conceptual metaphor is systemically mapped from source domain to target domain, the inner image-schematic structure of source domain is preserved; (3) in the exploration of JOURNEY domain, it is found that advertisers have an obvious tendency in choosing the features of source domain JOURNEY; (4) different conceptual metaphors also have a strong tendency in choosing features of source domain that are mapped onto the target domains even if they share the same source domain.Affect is found to play a key role in metaphorical advertising with a further study of the data. Those source domains which can raise a positive affect are more favorable to advertisers. But affect in the contemporary metaphor researches is generally neglected. We also find that there are some metaphors that go inconsistent with the definition Lakoff gave. These metaphors are mixed metaphors. And in current thesis we try to analyze this phenomenon under the framework of Conceptual Metaphor and conclude that mixed metaphors are acceptable and understandable by resorting to the corresponding concepts and conceptual metaphors at the superordinate level even though there are conflicts at semantic level. It can be said that mixed metaphors give us a new angle to look at things.