Interpretation Of Metaphor In English Commercial Advertising-From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

With the rapid development of commodity economy and the diversification of mass media, advertising is omnipresent in modern society and plays a significant role in our daily lives. In modern commercial advertising, different forms of metaphor are widely used and turn out to be an effective and distinctive device. This thesis interprets metaphor in English commercial advertising within the framework of Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory so as to figure out: (1) why metaphors are widely used in commercial advertising since they require extra processing effort and (2) how advertising metaphor guides the addressee to achieve optimal relevance based on the data collected from the internet, famous magazine, advertising books and other publications.After a detailed survey of some key notions of relevance theory concerning metaphor understanding and an relevance-theory-based account of metaphor as well as a number of commercial advertisements containing verbal metaphor and pictorial metaphor, the author proposes four reasons that account for the wide application of metaphor in advertising: as an ostensive stimulus, as a device to make the persuasion powerful, as a carrier of implicated information and as optimal relevance.Since metaphor guarantees a presumption of optimal relevance, the addressee is encouraged to search for it in processing the metaphor. The metaphor understanding process involves three sub-processes: recognition of metaphor, construction of contextual assumptions and recovery of implicatures. Optimal relevance is achieved by recovering an array of implicatures conveyed by metaphor.The study may make enlightenments to advertisers and the target audience. It may help advertisers make better application of metaphors in advertising and help the target audience search for cognitive efficiency and better understand metaphorical advertisements well.