A Conceptual Blending Approach To English Cosmetic Advertisements

Advertisements are the bridges between merchant and customers, by which merchants advertise their products and customers learn about the products. As a kind of advertisements, the cosmetic advertisement shares the features of other advertisements, such as, having certain target groups, aiming to arouse the potential customers’ curiosities and purchasing desires. However, the cosmetic advertisement also has its uniqueness. At present, the linguistic studies on the cosmetic advertisement has made remarkable achievements, but many researchers study it from the pragmatic, aesthetic, structural and functional viewpoints, while few analyze the cosmetic advertisement on the basis of cognitive linguistics.This research adopts the Conceptual Integration Theory put forward by Fauconnier&Turner as the theoretical foundation. According to the theory, mental spaces, as a basic mental capability, plays an important role in meaning construction. The essence of the operation is to construct a partial match between input mental spaces and to project selectively from those inputs into a novel’blended’mental space (Fauconnier,2001). These conceptual blending resources lead to the model of conceptual blending network. Due to the differences of frames and elements projected from the input spaces to the blended space, we have four kinds of conceptual blending networks; namely, simplex, single-scope, mirror and double-scope networks.This study selects50English cosmetic advertising slogans from the official websites of some world famous cosmetic brands and analyzes the conceptual blending process of the data within the framework of the Conceptual Blending Theory. Through the analysis, the research aims to reveal the general conceptual blending features of English cosmetic advertising slogans, to make a new classification of English cosmetic advertisements basing on the conceptual blending networks, and to interpret the reasons for the general features.Through the data analysis of these50English cosmetic advertising slogans, the study sums up the main conceptual blending features of English cosmetic advertisements:With regard to the grammatical devices, prepositional phrases and descriptions are usually applied to construct the mental spaces. The present tense and the indicative mood are dominated, and the pre-suppositional constructions and trans-spatial operators are generally realized by the definite descriptions and copula be respectively. In addition, the connectors mostly link the real world with the real world. In terms of the vital relations, the research reveals that8of the15vital relations are normally adopted as outer-space relations, especially the relations of Analogy and Disanalogy, and that5of them are generally applied as inner-space relations, especially Uniqueness, and Intentionality. However, the relations of Change and Cause-effect are both used between input spaces and within the blends.Furthermore, according to the conceptual blending networks, the study classifies the English cosmetic advertisements into four sorts:English cosmetic advertisements of simplex networks, of mirror networks, of single-scope networks, and of double-scope networks. Meanwhile, of the50English cosmetic advertisements, most of them are English cosmetic advertisements of double-scope networks; only few belong to the mirror networks. Additionally, through discussion, the research finds out that the frequencies of the conceptual blending classification may be affected by the western social culture, the main functions and aesthetic features of cosmetic advertisements.This research examines the applicability and explanatory ability of the Conceptual Blending Theory, which not only extends its application scope, but also casts light on the cosmetic advertising language design, especially on how to better apply the conceptual blending features of English cosmetic advertisements for the purpose of information communication and persuasion.