An Adaptation Theoretic Approach To Novel Metaphor In Magazine Advertisements

The present thesis attempts to explore novel metaphor in magazine advertisements from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective. With Verschueren's adaptation theory as the general conceptual framework, the author maintains that novel metaphor generation is a process of linguistic adaptation, involving two sub-tasks: adaptive to the mental world and adaptive to the social world of the target market. To testify our assumption, we conducted a two-level inquiry, based on the ads examples collected from fashion magazines.As a result, we found that first, novel metaphor serves the persuasive purpose of advertisements from two aspects - rational triggering and emotional triggering. Novelty exists in the emotion, simultaneously is created through reasoning. They both serve initiating a purchasing desire; second, it could be realized at two levels, micro-mechanically from the cognition through conceptual integration, and macroscopically with adaptation theory as socio-cultural norms, influencing the generation and interpretation of a novel metaphor; and finally, the inquiry result is compatible with the prediction made by adaptation theory about linguistic variability, negotiability and adaptability.An implication of this exploration is that it allows reciprocal causality, and in a complex advertising adaptive system, many an advertisement with less persuasiveness could be further refined from equilibrium toward variability because of the interaction of external circumstance and the target's own internal dynamic processes.