The Cognitive Analysis Of Metaphor In English Commercial Advertisement

With the development of economy, advertisement plays a much more importantrole in spreading product information, guiding the consumer and commercialpromotion. Modern advertisement design not only resorts to media like pictures,sound and words, but attaches to the application of metaphor especially novelmetaphor. This thesis aims to analyze the cognition and function of metaphor inadvertisements in terms of cognitive linguistic theory. In this way, the author wantsto give a reference for the advertising design, and obtain the expected goal.The study of metaphor can be traced back to Aristotle period, which does notonly have long history, but touches upon multi-discipline and angles, such aspsychology, philosophy, linguistics, semiotics and cognitive linguistics. Comparedwith the long history of metaphor in other fields, the focus of advertising academiain metaphor only started two decades ago (Dong Fang,2008:23).This thesis adopts the methodology of qualitative analysis, and the advertisingcases are extracted from English magazines and the Internet. Chapter One mainlyintroduces the importance and purpose of the present research, some concepts aboutadvertisement category, research methods and the theoretical framework of the thesis.Chapter Two is the literature review on conceptual metaphor and metaphor study inadvertisement. Chapter Three is the theoretical frame, according to the number ofmodes in source and target domain, the author divides the metaphor into monomodalmetaphor and multimodal metaphor in this thesis. Since Lakoff’s conceptualmetaphor primarily discusses one-to-one mapping from source to target domain, theauthor treats it as monomodal metaphor, and adopts Lakoff’s categorization: structuralmetaphor, orientational metaphor, and ontological metaphor to analyze how thepictorial metaphor realizes the persuasive and informing function in advertisements. The multimodal metaphor is achieved by visual mode and audio mode. However,provided the operability, this thesis only analyzes static visual metaphor in printedmaterial, that is verbal-pictorial metaphor. As for the interpretation of pictorialmetaphor, the author makes use of Fauconnier’s Conceptual Blending Theory. Basedon two domains: source domain and target domain, Fauconnier put forward fourspaces: two input spaces, a generic space and a blending space, and he gave theconcept of emergent structure for the first time. During the blending, the authoremphasizes how the multimodal metaphor constructs meaning to obtain the aim ofadvertising designers. Chapter Four is the case study with theories in the last chapter.It mainly discusses monomdoal metaphor and multimodal metaphor in advertisingrespectively with collected copra. Chapter Five is the conclusion of the thesis. First itgives a summary, and after giving a brief analysis of the limitations of the paper, theauthor proposes suggestions for further study.