The Interpretation Of Metaphors In English Print Advertisements Via The Conceptual Integration Theory

This thesis aims to carry out a study which explores the internal operatingmechanism of meaning construction in English print advertisement via the conceptualintegration theory.Nowadays advertising has entered such a highly-developed period thatadvertisements flood the human life and exist in nearly every aspect of society.Advertisements root in reality but go above the life with a distinguished quality ofcreativity. The overwhelming intrusion by advertising makes people hardly imagine aworld without advertisements. With the rapid development of science and technology,advertising absorbs more technical factors and push the creativity to leap to a newlevel. Such questions as “how advertising agency creates the meaning”,“howconsumers interpret the meaning” and “how advertisements exert a psychologicaleffect on consumers” attract many scholars from various fields–linguistics,advertising, cognitive linguistics and so on.This thesis intakes the important results from metaphor study since1980s andattempts to conduct a detailed analysis of the mechanism of the online meaninginstruction in advertising metaphor within the framework of the conceptualintegration theory, put forward by Fauconnier and Turner (1995). After the conceptualmetaphor theory by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Fauconnier (1985) proposed hismental space theory. Later on, he continued his research and cooperated with Turner(Fauconnier&Turner1995) to raise the conceptual integration theory. Due to itswidespread application and greatly explanatory power in the way of thinking, theconceptual integration theory may take the responsibility of uncovering the cognitiveiceberg through the illustration of the online meaning making process.With a method of qualitative analysis, English print advertisements collectedfrom newspapers, magazines and the internet are classified in compliance with thefour models of conceptual integration networks and are studied in terms of its meaning producing process derived from both of its pictorial and literal elements.Through the analysis, this thesis exemplifies its strong power in explaining howhuman beings interpret and understand meaning when they are talking and thinking.The results of this study can be not only applied in advertising production andadvertising appreciation, but also provide much cognitive account for human creativeways of thinking.