A Critical-cognitive Analysis Of Gender Metaphors In Advertising

As an effective cognitive tool and essential way of thinking, metaphor has already become the most persuasive means in advertising, since metaphors in advertising can not only enrich the forms of advertising, but also extend meanings of the advertising by textual or visual information and create multilevel interpretations which may convey and reflect significant social values, conventions and ideology. Although ideological metaphors have already been elaborated by many researchers, only few of them probe into one typical kind of ideological metaphor found in advertising, gender metaphor. This thesis will focus on this kind of metaphor to see how they are manifested in advertising, to what extent they convey certain non-neutral assumptions as gender discrimination implicitly and how they are interpreted and therefore influence the target audience during the process of meaning construction.In order to analyze metaphor as a tool to disclose the hidden ideologies and values especially on gender identity, this thesis investigates the methodological convenience of an integrated critical-cognitive approach with the methodology of Critical Metaphor Analysis extending from study of verbal metaphors to that of visual or multimodal metaphors. Specifically, during three-stage research procedure, Conceptual Metaphor Theory is utilized to screen and to identify conceptual metaphors in the corpus of130samples of print advertisements. Then the three criteria of Velasco-Sacristan are adopted to identify the research object-gender metaphors and they will be classified and explained one by one. Lastly Conceptual Blending Theory is applied to case study to achieve a better representation of the meaning construction processes of metaphors, hence revealing the hidden mental mechanism within the addressee’s mind when they interpret nonverbal metaphorical advertisements encoded with implied meanings.Through an extensive research into gender metaphors, the present thesis has reached the following major findings. a. This critical-cognitive analysis of the pictorial metaphors hidden behind words, images and symbols in advertising enriches the methodology of analyzing pictorial or visual metaphors with the approach of Critical Metaphor Analysis and deepens the scope of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory; b. After checking each metaphorical ad with the three criteria given by Velasco-Sacristan (2003,2005a, b),69initiations of gender metaphor are identified, accounting for62%of the total number of conceptual metaphors in the corpus, which is a strong evidence of the wide existence of gender metaphors; c. Each of them falls into one or more types of gender metaphors, the three types of which follow the gradient levels of universality-specificity. This categorization conforms to that of Velasco-Sacristan’s study, but the ratio and subtypes within each category are somewhat diverged; d. Conceptual Blending Theory appears to interpret adequately the cognitive process and meaning construction of gender metaphors that involve concepts from different mental spaces. Through studying their cross-space mappings in different conceptual blending processes, this research presents how they are interpreted by the target audience.The author hopes that this thesis can remind the advertisers of their social responsibilities of avoiding discriminatory instantiations of metaphors instead of only focusing on gaining profits and help the addressee raise the awareness and grow to overcome negative social consequences of certain non-neutral assumptions as gender discrimination manifested implicitly by the advertisers.