Television Advertising Metaphor

Just as metaphors can find its way in languages everywhere, metaphors also finds a full expression in movie &TV advertisement. The reason is that metaphors is not only a phenomenon of language, but also a way of thinking and cognition, which take it's root in the concepts structure of human being. Metaphors, by its nature, is a tool by which human can understand the world around us and form concepts. Metaphors help us to grasp the nature of unknown objects or experience via known ones, or comprehend known things in the light of new experience.Metaphors in a certain language have long been the research topic of general interest among linguists. Yet only a few scholars have taken pains to investigate metaphors in advertising. Less effort has been made to study the cognition and interpretation of advertising, let alone movie &TV advertisement. The author takes movie &TV advertisement in Chinese as subject for study in an attempt to offer some reasonable explanations on how metaphors in ads are perceived, to explore for what reason metaphors in ads are not interpreted as intended and to discuss how metaphors help to achieve the goal of ads.The author probes into the nature of metaphors. In order to discuss fully about the metaphors in TV and movie advertisement, the author reviews some study concerning this topic in the area of Semiotics and Film Studies. Then the author identifies the metaphor among lots of TV and movie advertisements and makes classification with an aim of clearer study.The advertisement communication is a process of coding and decoding, and the latter plays an important role in the successful communication of metaphor. To explore the process of interpretation, the paper introduces a relevance-blending model and explains the process with a case-study by using the revised model. The paper, then, points out that the lack of similarity and mapping of secondary property may lead to the failure of metaphor. As to the audience, the cultural variation and individual differences serves as potential factors influencing metaphor interpretation. Finally, the paper discuses in what way the metaphor can function in the creation of advertisement, which is just the aim of this study.