An Analysis Of Chinese Print Public Service Advertisements From The Viewpoint Of Conceptual Blending Theory

The public service advertisement is the outcome of modern society. It is a kind of non-commercial advertising that provides public service for the public's vital interests. By means of transmitting some beneficial social ideas, the public service advertisement functions to create a good social morality and build a green environment for human survival, which makes human beings healthily developing and society advancing.The current studies of advertising are mostly from the viewpoints of functional grammar, speech acts, and rhetorical figures. Nevertheless, there are few studies of public service advertisements from the perspective of conceptual integration theory. The present thesis takes the Chinese print public service advertisements as the research object, and analyzes them from the cognitive angle of conceptual blending in the framework of conceptual networks models, i.e. simplex networks, mirror networks, single-scope networks and double-scope networks. The author makes an attempt to elaborate how the audience interpret the meaning in the public service advertisements, esp. the creative meaning. By collecting the prize-winning public service advertisements from national advertising contests and selecting twenty two print public service advertisements as examples, the author analyzes their meaning construction respectively from the compound, syntactic structure, rhetorical figures and visual rhetorical aspects. And the mental process of the audience in understanding the emergent meaning is further demonstrated. The conclusion goes as follows:1.The conceptual integration theory has an effective explanation of linguistic content in public service advertisements as well as of the visual images. As to the linguistic content, it shows that conceptual blending is widely used by the audience to interpret the meaning in different levels from the compound, syntactic structure to rhetorical figures. The emergent structure in the blend space is the core of conceptual blending and also the key to interpret the creative meanings in public service advertisements. As to the visual images, pictures in the public service advertisement also provide a special type of mental spaces that is an important component in conceptual blending and give rise to visual rhetorical effects.2.The mirror networks, single-scope networks and double-scope networks are more frequently used while the simplex network is less used. It shows that the simple linguistic form of public service advertisements corresponds to the complex mental networks model. A simple form can prompt the construction of an extremely complicated meaning.The last but not the least, it expands the application scope of Fauconnier's conceptual integration theory in the field of public service advertisement discourses in China to some extent. And it is an addition and development of the previous studies. It is hoped to provide some valuable reference to the deep study of the advertising discourse.