A Cognitive Interpretation Of Metaphors In Advertising

The realized value of metaphor mainly depends on the addressees. The addressers canconvey their ideas by means of constructing the metaphor. The advertising creators, that is, theaddressers, intend to make use of the highly enriched artistic language to highlight the distinctfeature of the products. In this way, the audience, that is, the addressees can figure out the deepmeanings from the surface expression of the advertising slogan. The latter play the principalrole in the interpretation process, and depend on whether the metaphor can make a hit or not.Searching the literature related to the metaphors in advertising, we find that Chinese scholarsfocus on applying Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Blending Theory intointerpreting the metaphors in advertising. While westerner scholars concentrate on the effectanalysis of metaphors in advertising. However, few researches have been done on the cognitiveinterpretation of metaphors in advertising from the addressees’ point of view under theframework of Mental Models-Based Stereotypical Reasoning Theory. Thus, it is well worthybeing studied instead of being ignored.This thesis, based on those concrete English and Chinese metaphorical advertisements,will adopt a cognitive approach to explore the interpretation trigging mechanisms for metaphorsin advertising with the framework of Mental Models-Based Stereotypical Reasoning Theory inorder to establish a set of cognitive interpretation models for the addressees. Three metaphortheories will be involved in the thesis: Conceptual Metaphor Theory; Conceptual BlendingTheory; and Mental Models-Based Stereotypical Reasoning Theory. The thesis mainly dealswith three issues:(1) For the explanation of metaphors in advertising, a contrastive analysis ofthe three metaphor theories will be made;(2) Based on Mental Models-Based StereotypicalReasoning Theory, three mechanisms will be discussed: analogical association, mentalmodeling and conceptual dilution.(3) The functions of three mechanisms will be clarified:mental modeling can be considered to be core of the three; analogical association serves as the method, while conceptual dilution is treated as the base. And these three mechanisms areinteracted each other in the interpretation process.The thesis has tested and verified the Mental Models-Based Stereotypical ReasoningTheory can be applied in interpreting metaphors in advertising. Moreover, the theory canbe applied well into understanding the implied meaning of metaphors in advertising basedon three triggering mechanisms: analogical association; mental modeling and conceptualdilution. Therefore, theoretically, the thesis can provide a new view into the cognitivemechanisms of the metaphorical advertisements. Practically speaking, as for the adscreators, the thesis can contribute to producing much more and better metaphoricaladvertisements, which further speeds up social and economic development.