| With the development of advertising industry, multi-modality has stepped into this area. However, language still remains the most important form of advertisements. With its simplicity and usefulness, advertisement language has drawn much attention in the academic circle. Scholars home and abroad have tried to analyze the operation mechanism of advertisements from different perspectives. In this thesis, the author firstly presents several studying angles of advertisement research, ie. aesthetics, semiotics and linguistics. However, cognitive mechanism should be attached great importance in order to survey the process of meaning construction of advertisement language. As a cognitive mechanism and conceptual phenomenon, metonymy is based on people’s experience. Metonymy aims to hightlight, map and construct one experience with another. Through the similarity and contiguity between things, cognitive metonymy leaves the space of imagination and comprehension to consumers which avoids immediate illustrations. Thus, this helps to reach an effect of vivid images.The research data in this thesis are collected from different types of advertisements. The two main levels of metonymy are whole-part and part-part. After doing statistics, a qualitative analysis of advertisement language is conducted by using the operation mechanism of cognitive metonymy. Some relevant subtypes of cognitive metonymy are: Action ICM, Perception ICM, Possession ICM, Event ICM and so on. The research findings show that the widespread use of cognitive metonymy in advertisement language provides a new perspective for people to do researches on the meaning construction of advertisement language. |
PDF Full Text Request