A Cognitive Approach To Conceptual Metaphors In English Commercial Advertising

With the development of economy, advertising as an important element of the market economy becomes more and more important. A piece of good commercial advertisement can attract the consumers'interest, arouse the consumers'potential purchase desire, and then make the consumers purchase the products that are introduced in the advertisement. So commercial advertising promotes the product sales, and boosts the market economy development. Therefore, it is worthy of exploring for researchers.In 1980, George Lackoff and Mark Johnson published the book:Metaphors We Live By, which was hailed as the beginning of cognitive linguistics. From that time on, it opened a new chapter for the metaphor study. In the field of cognitive linguistics, metaphor is named conceptual metaphor, which is different from the metaphor in other linguistic studies, and it is one of our important tools for human to understand some abstract concepts and things. A kind of mapping process accompany the conceptual metaphor occurred. The study of conceptual metaphor goes beyond the level of language.In this thesis, the qualitative method is adopted as the research method. Three types of conceptual metaphors, such as orientational metaphor, ontological metaphor, and structural metaphor, are introduced as the theoretical framework. Three kinds of commercial advertising, such as auto advertising, cosmetic advertising, and beverage advertising, are adopted as the corpus.The significance of this thesis is to explain and analyze the application of conceptual metaphor in three kinds of commercial advertising language. It also explains and analyzes the feature and function of conceptual metaphor, and how the conceptual metaphor works in commercial advertising. Accordingly, under the guidance of conceptual metaphor, the thesis aims at finding out some way to improve the persuasive function of commercial advertising. The study of commercial advertising underlying the framework of conceptual metaphor theory, may not only improve our ability to understand and appreciate the commercial advertising language, but also provide corpora and evidence for conceptual metaphor theory in the application of the commercial advertising.