A CIT-based Study Of Synaesthesia In Advertising Language

Synaesthesia, as a special kind of metaphor, is the link of senses. Abundantforerunners have explored the working mechanism of synaesthesia in light of ConceptualIntegration Theory (CIT), but these researches are confined to the application of CIT insynaesthesia, without providing a profound analysis of the theory, clarifying only some ofits essential features, and applying theses features for the task of analyzing synaesthesia.On the other hand, it is widely acknowledged that the transferring tendency of synaesthesiais from lower senses to higher ones. But it is doubtful whether this tendency is applicablein all genres of language.In answer to the above improvements, this thesis attempts to explore synaesthesia inadvertising language in light of CIT. First of all, we collect100linguistic synaestheticinstances in advertisements, which are then categorized into one in line with thehierarchical transfer tendency and the other violating it. On the basis of the empiricalresearch, we arrive at a remarkable discovery that there exists a high percentage ofsynaesthesia that violates the regular transferring sequence in advertising language. As tothis finding, we tentatively propose that the working mechanism of synaesthesia isrestricted by text genres. Secondly, CIT is exploited to specifically analyze and interpretthe instances against the transferring tendency. Distinguished from previous studies, thisthesis provides a brand-new interpretation for synaesthesia concerning the directionalityand prominence involved in CIT. It is proposed that synaesthesia in advertising languageexhibits an obvious feature of bidirectionality, as is attested by our corpus analysis and canalso be expounded from what is called conventionality or conventional relations. Also, thisthesis denies the conventional thought that the function of projection is that a concept inone sensory domain is transferred to another sensory domain in synaesthetic metaphor, butadvances that the role of projection is to highlight what are less prominent or inactive inthe target domain by means of the elements that are prominent in the source domain.