The Compression Of Vital Relations And The Cognitive Interpretation Of Pun In Chinese Advertisements

In recent years, advertising language, as a special language style, has gradually become a hot topic in the research area. But most of the researchers did some research from the following aspects: the linguistic features, semiotics, rhetoric and the pragmatic perspectives. Studies of these approaches had their own advantages, but they didn't much reveal the cognitive understanding mechanisms. This thesis mainly adopts the compression of vital relations in the Conceptual Integration Theory (CIT) which is proposed by Fauconnier and Turner to expound the pun in Chinese advertisements. What's more, the author makes a classification of the advertisements according to the different ways of compression of the vital relations, which take place during people's understanding process. The paper aims to provide a new perspective for the interpretation of the pun in advertisements and then reveal dynamic understanding process for the understanding of the pun in Chinese advertisements.The thesis mainly applies the vital relations in the CIT theory and makes a classification and interpretation of those 10 pieces of advertisements according to the different compressed vital relations. Firstly the author makes a review of the previous studies and finds out the shortcomings and limitations. Then it provides a new research angle and makes an introduction of the relevant theories. They are: the basic framework of the CIT theory and some vital relations as: cause-effect, analogy, disanalogy, change, identity, time, space, part-whole, representation, role, property, similarity, category, intentionality and the uniqueness. Some of them are outer-space relations and some others are inner-space relations. So there are basically two compressing ways. One is to compress the outer-space relation into the inner-space relation and the other one is to compress the inner-space relations. Through the compression we can get the emergent structure which is people's ultimate understanding of the utterance. All in all the compressing process is a dynamic one to interpret.Finally, this thesis makes a reasonable explanation of those advertisements and reveals the meaning of pun in advertisement as well as conducts a classification according to the compressing vital relations. Therefore, the research proves the powerful explanation of the theory and provides a dynamic way for the interpretation and hopefully it would provide the advertising designer some inspirations.