Cognitive Approach To Synaesthesia In Advertising Language

Modern society is informative. As a means of transmitting information, advertising has become an indispensable part to human's life. With the passage of time as well as the development of economy, advertisements seem to have pervaded every corner of social life. Just like metaphor is pervasive in human's life, synaesthesia is ubiquitous as well. And its effect in advertising language cannot be ignored.This thesis attempts to conduct a study from a cognitive perspective on synaesthesia in advertisements. Originally, synaesthesia is a term used in the field of rhetoric and the former researchers studied synaesthesia as a rhetorical method. Lakoff and Johnson's Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) provides a new way for the research of figures of speech. Different from a conventional rhetorical perspective, this thesis tries a study of synaesthesia from the perspective of cognition using the research method provided by CMT. This thesis considers synaesthesia as a subject of thinking as well as a subject of language just as metaphor. Then we will show the use of synaesthesia in advertisements and their novel and original effects. In addition, this thesis will draw on Fauconnier and Turner's Conceptual Integration Theory (CIT) to probe into the nature of synaesthetic metaphors and explore the meaning construction process of synaesthetic metaphors.This thesis is divided into six chapters. Chapter one is a general introduction of advertising language and a brief review of it. The main part of the thesis is chapter 2,3, 4 and 5. In these four chapters, we will demonstrate that synaesthesia is a special kind of metaphor by CMT and enquire the meaning construction of synaesthetic metaphors through CIT. At last, conclusions are drawn and some proposals for further research are mentioned.