Conceptual Blending And English Printed Metaphorical Advertisements

This paper aims at the study of metaphorical advertisements with reference to Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner's Conceptual Blending theory (Conceptual Integration theory) (Fauconnier and Turner , 2002), which offers the most exciting possibilities for exploring the hidden cognitive mechanism involved in the interpretation of metaphorical advertisements. Advertisements make extensive uses of metaphors, both verbal and pictorial. For verbal metaphor analysis, Lakoff's categorization of structural metaphor, ontological metaphor and orientation metaphor is introduced (Lakoff, 1980). The four-type model for pictorial metaphor proposed by Forceville (2002) is employed to analyze four advertisements abstracted from magazines, such as Forbes, Fortune, Time, Newsweek, etc. The aim is threefold: (1) to prove the applicability of Conceptual Blending theory both to verbal and pictorial metaphors in metaphorical advertisements; (2) to test the model with new recent corpus of printed English pictorial advertisements; (3) to disclose where the creativity of advertisement comes from and how the addressee is involved in the mental cognitive meaning construction and produce the purchase desires.Advertisement is a kind of informative and pervasive non-personal communication with practical and clear communication aims in today's society. Recently, in the common catching and effective advertisements, verbal especially metaphorical pictorial expressions are more and more applied by the ad creators/advertisers as a strategy to achieve the effective conveyance of the advertised concepts of the products or services to the target addressee. Based on some theoretical knowledge of advertisement and the conceptual blending theory, this paper shows that the metaphorical expressions of metaphor in advertisements, verbal and pictorial in this paper, reveal the great creative ideas of the advertiser and the extensive imaginative capacity of the addressee within the conceptual integration networks in interpreting advertisement.