A Cognitive Study Of Advertising Language From The Perspective Of Conceptual Integration

Nowadays, in this economic society in which information is prevailing, advertisement has been applied in many fields with its unique style, refined syntax and rich connotations, and the ultimate aim of which is to persuade the consumers to purchase the products advertised. How an advertiser makes use of language skill to arouse audiences'interest and how consumers produce purchase desire become the key strategy for the success of advertising. At the present time, linguists and ads researchers at home and abroad have studied advertising from the perspectives of linguistic features, style features, figurative speech, and sociolinguistic, functional and cultural connotations, while the psychology of consumers and the cognitive study on its meaning construction has been paid little attention to and it lacks a systematic analysis. Fauconnier and Turner's conceptual integration theory, which is to explore how the audiences understand advertisements,thus exposing the dynamic and cognitive process in their minds can be applied to the analysis of meaning construction and cognitive mechanism of advertising language.Conceptual integration theory and conceptual integration network are the continuation and development of mental space theory, which is based on conceptual metaphor theory. A typical conceptual integration network includes four mental spaces, namely, two input spaces, a generic space and a blended space respectively. The four mental spaces interrelate with each other through cross-space mapping and selective projection and eventually, the emergent structure is produced in the blended space by composition, completion and elaboration.The full text thought is that the author first will classify advertising language into four categories based on the four integration network models: [1] advertising language of simplex network, [2] advertising language of mirror network, [3] advertising language of single-scope network, [4] advertising language of double-scope network, and through the case study, the thesis testifies the explanatory power of conceptual integration theory. Then a survey of the advertising language interpretation by college students is made in this thesis. It is carried out to answer the question whether the conceptual integration theory can improve students'ability in understanding advertising language. 114 students who are from Harbin University of Science and Technology, from four classes in Grade 2009 with different majors participate in the investigation.The author finds that CIT does help the students interpret advertising language deeply and it has powerful explanation on advertising language through the analysis of the results. At the same time, the author believes that learning some relevant knowledge of CIT will be helpful for anyone who wants to improve their cognitive abilities in perceiving things.