A Study Of Metonymy In Advertisements

Modern society is an informative one. Advertising has penetrated into every corner ofour society and has become a necessary part to everyone’s life in the way of transmittinginformation. Though an advertisement may include various kinds of elements, language is oneof the most important one. As a basic thinking pattern, metonymy is based on humanexperience. It reflects, constructs, and assumes one kind of experience with the help ofanother kind of experience. By using similarity, proximity and the audiences’ imaginationpoint, metonymy in advertising language provides a new way for consumers to accept newthings and makes advertisements more vivid and impressive. Therefore, this thesis tries tomake a study which investigates the working mechanism of metonymy in advertisementsfrom a cognitive perspective, and explores its functions in advertising language. The databaseis one hundred and fifty randomly collected samples from various sources. First of all, byusing a quantitative study, the author has made a conclusion that there are altogether87advertisements which have applied cognitive metonymy. Then the author gets to know whichbelong to WHOLE-PART idealized cognitive models and which belong to part-part idealizedcognitive models. Then, the author is to conduct a qualitative study, which attempts to explorehow metonymy is used in advertising language. The findings are as follows:(i) There areabundant metonymies used in advertisements. Advertisement is a metonymic process in whichthe advertisers utilize WHOLE-PART idealized cognitive model or PART-PART idealizedcognitive model to advertise the product. In the150advertisements that the author collected,there are altogether87advertisements which have applied metonymies. WHOLE-PARTidealized cognitive models are amounted to40which mainly involve six kinds of ICMs: theThing-and-Part ICM, the Scale ICM, the Constitution ICM, the Event ICM, theCategory-and-Member ICM and the Category-and-Property ICM. Part-Part ICMs are evenmore commonly used in advertisements. According to the author’s statistics,47advertisements have employed metonymy. They mainly involve the Action ICM, thePerception ICM, the Causation ICM, the Production ICM, the Control ICM, the PossessionICM, the Containment ICM, the Location ICM and the Modification ICM.(ii) The reason thatmetonymy can be effectively used to build the concise and refined advertising language and makes it easier to be understood is due to its unique WHOLE-PART idealized cognitivemodels and PART-PART idealized cognitive models. In order to save effort and to make thecommunication economic, people sometimes don’t speak out all the information that theywant to convey. Instead, they use the most relevant, salient, easy-to-perceive information torepresent what they want to convey.(iii) Metonymy plays an important role in advertisinglanguage and it can make us aware of a new view for the research of advertising language. Thestudy will enable the target audiences to understand and use advertisements correctly and inthis way it will provide valuable data for advertisement writers.