A Cognitive Linguistic Study Of Branding

The process of naming, pervasive in human language, is an everlasting issue in thehistory of linguistics. As a new branch of naming, branding (brand naming) comes out withthe highly development of commercial economy, involving the fields of semiotics,psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, as well as pragmatics. Thus, it attaches significantlygreat importance to the study of linguistics. On the one hand, it enlarges the contents oflanguage research and improves the enrichment of naming theory system. On the other hand,it provides a linguistic foundation and motivation for companies to achieve the practical brandnaming process successfully through accelerating the mechanism of branding constantly.Since the1980s, cognitive linguistics springs up with the representatives of Lakoff andJohnson. Based on the cognition and experientialist philosophy, cognitive linguistics claimsthat language originates from human bodily experience, which severs as the basis in theprocess of language construal. Moreover, all the language phenomena in the visual world arethe results from the conceptualized cognitive activities. From this perspective, the traditionalmetaphor and metonymy are recognized as tools for human experience and cognition, whichbring enlightenments for the study of branding.Taking a large number of well-known brand names both at home and abroad as cases,this article undertakes a qualitative and quantitative analysis of branding with the theoreticalframework of conceptual metaphor and metonymy, which purports to reveal the cognitivemechanisms of brand creation. The results show that:(1) the phenomenon of cognition ispervasive in the process of brand name creation in both English and Chinese.(2) the cognitivemechanisms of branding mainly consist of the metaphorical process and the metonymicprocess. The former mechanism is generated in terms of the comparison operation, while thelatter is shaped by virtue of the correlation operation.(3) the correlation operations within themetonymic mechanism, domain reduction and domain expansion, take the dominant positionof branding, occupying52.8%of the total cases. Meanwhile, the comparison operations,taking up35.3%of the total, consist of two parts, the low-level comparison operation and thehigh-level comparison operation. Frankly, this study applies the conceptual metaphor and metonymy theories into thecognitive mechanisms of branding creation. From the above basis, not only do we promotethe development of interdisciplinary study between cognitive semantics and branding, butalso fill the gap in current researches on the cognitive semantics of branding.