Interpretation Of Metaphors In Advertising Based On Theory Of Relevance

Advertising has become an important commercial communication means in the presentworld. It is omnipresent in modern society, and it plays an important role in people's dailylife and communication. Advertisers employ a lot of metaphors in advertisements to makethem more effective by inspiring the audience to look for the range of their implicatures.By using metaphors advertisers can avoid exaggerative claims about their products'certain functions and avoid unnecessary dissensions since the audience take a large part ofresponsibility in deriving the implicatures. This thesis aims at interpreting metaphors inadvertising within the framework of the Relevance Theory.Sperber and Wilson proposed the Relevance Theory in their book Relevance:Communication and Cognition in 1986. The theory treats communication as a cognitiveactivity. It maintains that communication is a process involving ostension and inferenceand human communication is governed by the principle of relevance: every act ofostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance.This thesis is a tentative study of metaphors in advertising within the framework of theRelevance Theory. It holds that communication in advertising is also communicationinvolving ostension and inference, that metaphors in advertising are used as ostensivestimuli to attract the audience's attention and focus the audience's attention on advertisers'informative intentions. This thesis attempts to discuss how metaphors, including verbaland pictorial metaphors, help the audience to recover the advertiser's informativeintention and acquire optimal relevance, thus showing that the Relevance Theory is apowerful tool in the interpretation of metaphors in advertising.