A Conceptual Blending Theory Approach To The Interpretation Of Parody In Advertising Discourse

Advertising, as one of the ways to promote products, has definitely played an essential role in people's daily life. In order to attract the attention of the audiences, a lot of efforts have been made into the linguistic choices of the advertising, which is to stir the audiences'desire to buy the product advertised. Among so many language devices, parody enjoys frequent appearance in advertisements. Many researchers also show great interest in parody for its practicality and novelty. However, most of the studies on parody at home and abroad have been mainly carried out from a literary perspective or a traditional rhetorical device, stressing its aesthetic and rhetorical effects, while the cognitive study on parody has been paid scant attention to. Therefore, the Conceptual Blending Theory will be adopted in this thesis to probe into meaning construction and cognitive mechanism of parodic advertisements, in the hope of furthering the study of the traditional theories.Conceptual Blending Theory is the main theory adopted in the thesis, which has complete networks. These networks consist of four mental spaces:two input spaces, one generic space and one blended space. Generic space provides information that is abstract enough to be common to both the inputs. Elements in the generic space are mapped onto counterparts in each of the input spaces, which motivate the identification of cross-space counterparts in the input spaces. Then through composition, completion and elaboration, the blended space develops emergent structures of its own. The parodic advertisements are chosen as the study subject here and they will be categorized into four types and investigated respectively in four integration network models. It aims to develop a cognitive framework for the linguistic study of parodic advertisements with examples from both English and Chinese as an illustration of the framework offered. The main purpose of the application of parody in advertisements is to help the audiences integrate the new information with the familiar and background knowledge stored in mind so as to formulate an overall impression of the advertisements. By applying the Conceptual Blending Theory to the analysis of parody in advertising, the generating and interpreting process of parody will be explored, and an alternative perspective will be offered to explain how the advertisers achieve their persuasive goals and the consumers construct meanings from the novel expressions in advertisements. In this way, it can be verified that the mental process of the parodic advertisements can be explained from the cognitive aspect. The combination of the Conceptual Blending Theory and the comprehension of parody in adverting discourse provide both fields with a new perspective and enrich the studies in both parody theory and cognitive science.