Persuasiveness Of Metaphor In English Commercial Advertisements-Speech Act Theory Approach

Nowadays, advertising, as a special genre with a special purpose, has penetrated into every corner of our life as its transmitting media exists in many forms: newspaper, magazine, TV, radio and internet. As a kind of propagandization device, the ultimate goal of advertising is to communicate information concerning the product, or the service advertised to consumers in order to persuade them to purchase. Advertising takes many forms, but in most of them language is of crucial importance. Language has a powerful influence over people and their behavior. This is especially true in the fields of advertising. The choice of language to convey specific messages with the intention of influencing and persuading people is of vital importance.The working of advertisements is, in most cases, carefully crafted to meet particular ends. Sometimes it is intended to inform, but more often, and more importantly, to persuade and influence. The functions of advertising language are closely related to and controlled by the advertising purpose, that is, persuading. The appeal of the language is thus of vital importance to the fulfillment of the function of advertising.Therefore, advertisers must try their best to attract target consumers'attention, stimulate their interest, and then get them into action. To achieve the goal, ads must be persuasive enough to win their audience'positive attitudes towards them, which makes persuasiveness to be the most striking feature in adverting language. It is from this point that the thesis starts.Persuasion means to change the attitude, behavior and attitude of the receiver or consumer party in advertising. In fact, advertising is a form of producing persuasive messages for the purpose to gain the attention of the target audience as well as to affect the attitudes, behavior of these consumers. A message is considered persuasive when its primary objective is to sell some product, idea, service or course of actions. It is not necessary that the buyer be persuaded at the first attempt, but all persuasions involve a shift in the receiver's reaction and thinking about that very product. However, it all depends upon the persuading power of the seller as well as the skills to manipulate the qualities of the product according to the needs of the buyer when providing explanation.The language of advertising has been the subject of studies in different disciplines, since language, in most advertisements, is of crucial importance in information transmission. The language of advertising is carefully written with the purpose of arousing readers'attention and interest and persuading them to buy the products or services advertised in the advertisement. This is mainly reflected in commercial advertisements, which I'm focusing on in this thesis, as commercial advertisements place more emphasis on persuasiveness rather than merely on information transmission.Rhetorical devices are frequently employed in advertising language. Among the traditional rhetorical devices, metaphor is effectively used by advertisers to meet their ends. We can say that a striking feature of advertising language is the utilization of metaphor, which would help advertisements gain a more powerful impact to achieve its goal of selling products or services. The main clue of the thesis is to explain the persuasiveness of metaphor in advertising in the light of the speech act theory.Some linguists have studied metaphor breaking from rhetorical study methods and J.R. Searle was one of them, who gave a new analysis by means of the speech act theory, which provides the fundamental theoretical support for the thesis. Searle has set up a pragmatic framework for metaphor interpretation.The speech act theory, preliminarily proposed by J. L. Austin, states that people do not just use language to say something (to make statements), but to do things (perform actions). The theory was then further developed by John R. Searle, the apprentice philosopher of Austin. He made revisions upon Austin's former"performative hypothesis"by introducing the concept of propositional act, and this initiates a reclassification of illocutionary acts. He has also put forward three sets of steps and eight principles for metaphor recognition and interpretation.It is hoped that the application of speech act theory in advertising can provide some lingual strategies and techniques for the language usage in advertising. Ads writers can make deep impressions on ads through using some useful lingual strategies and techniques so as to reach commercial goals of promoting products or services.Any attempt to study metaphor has to give answers to such questions as: what is metaphor? Why do we use metaphor? How do metaphors work? How do we interpret metaphor? This paper proposes to tackle these questions by focusing on the persuasiveness of metaphor in advertisement in the light of the speech act theory.