A Cognitive Approach To Parodic Use Of Chinese Idioms In Advertisements

Idioms, the treasure of national language culture, carry abundant cultural details and boundless language glamour. With their fixed syntactic structures and special semantic contents, idioms have been one of the focuses in linguistic study. For a long time, many linguists have done too much research on the syntactic and semantic characteristics of idioms, the source of idioms, teaching and learning of idioms and the comparison of English idioms and Chinese idioms. Especially, since the development of cognitive linguistics, there have been also more and more studies on the generation and application of idioms. However, nowadays, in the field of idiomatic study, plenty of research results on English idioms and the comparison of English idioms and Chinese idioms have been achieved, while studies on Chinese idioms are seldom seen.As Chinese idioms, especially the Chinese idioms made up of four characters are concise, vivid, rhythmic, profound, and familiar to the public, the parodic use of Chinese idioms is very popular in advertising language, even to the degree of abuse. Therefore, the normalization of parodic use of Chinese idioms in advertisements is urgent to be focused and solved. The parodic use of Chinese idioms is a cognitive mental process, and the parodic use of Chinese idioms in advertisements is to express new pragmatic meaning and reach special advertising effect by changing the forms of existing Chinese idioms. Therefore, the new language expressions formed by the parodic use of Chinese idioms in advertisements must be related to the original Chinese idioms, and the formation of them should have cognitive motivation. Besides, advertising is a process of communication, and also a process of information transmission and persuasion. Therefore, the creation of advertisements must be aimed to reach advertising effect, and advertising language must be normalized.With a broad cognitive perspective, here, on the one hand, by studying and classifying the data collected, we reveal the cognitive process of two different types of parodic use of Chinese idioms in advertisements with Construction Grammar and Conceptual Integration Theory respectively; on the other hand, the abuse of parodic use of Chinese idioms in advertisements is so severe nowadays that we try to study the normalization of parodic use of Chinese idioms in advertisements in a deep degree:we generalize the principles of normalizing parodic use of Chinese idioms in advertisements by analysis, and interpret them with Relevance Theory, in order to provide solid foundation for the development of advertising language.Based on Fillmore’s view towards the classifications of idioms, Chinese idioms can be classified into schematic Chinese idioms and substantive Chinese idioms. Through the analysis of the parodic uses of Chinese idioms in the collected Chinese advertisements, we find that, the parodic use of schematic Chinese idioms and the parodic use of substantive Chinese idioms have their own different characteristics, and they are two different kinds of cognitive processes, intrinsically, resulting from different cognitive mechanisms included in Construction Grammar and Conceptual Integration Theory respectively. As the semantic structures of schematic Chinese idioms are half-stable, they are always ready to be completed. The parodic use of schematic Chinese idioms is a process of completing original Chinese idiomatic constructions with new semantic elements, and also a process of coercion from original Chinese idiomatic constructions to new semantic elements. Therefore, new expressions from such a kind of parodic use correspond to the original Chinese idiomatic constructions. As regards substantive Chinese idioms, their semantic structures are stable, so the parodic use of them must result in the change of their semantic structures. Therefore, such a process of parodic use is only integrating the original Chinese idiomatic constructions as a whole with new semantic elements to create new semantic structures which the new expressions have.The parodic use of Chinese idioms in advertisements relies on the capability of human cognition, but it is not arbitrary. Advertising is a special communication between advertisers and consumers. Whether consumers can understand the advertising intensions or not, and whether the advertisements are successful or not, depend on the advertising languages are appropriate or not. Based on Relevance Theory, advertising is a kind of ostensive-referential communication, a process of understanding the linguistic meaning of the advertisement, choosing the optimal context, and getting the true intension of the advertisement. Therefore, the series of conditions ensuring the success of these three steps in advertising communication decide that advertising language must conform to certain principles. That is to say, we try to discuss the normalization of the parodic use of Chinese idioms in advertisements from the perspective of Relevance Theory. It aims to make the principles of normalizing the parodic use of Chinese idioms in advertisements more persuasive, to guide the advertising creation more effectively, and to avoid the abuse of parodic use of Chinese idioms in advertisements.