A Study Of Cognitive Mechanism In Parody Applied In Advertisement

With the human society entering the Information Era, advertising, as the best way to promote commodities, can be nearly found in every corner of people’s daily life. In order to rapidly attract the customer’s attention, great efforts have been made into the choice of linguistic devices for the designing of advertisements. Parody, as a linguistic device, is usually found to win an upper hand over some other language forms to convey new information due to its special trait of "new wine in old bottles". Nowadays, parody is more and more widely employed as a strategy in various media such as magazines, newspapers, and TV commercials. Somehow, previous studies of parody mainly focus on its rhetorical effects and aesthetic functions. However, the present study, based on two fundamental theories in linguistics—Conceptual Integration Theory and Relevance Theory, aims at a comprehensive interpretation of parody from the cognitive view.Conceptual Integration Theory, brought forward by Fauconnier&Turner, which is developed based on Mental Space Theory, is an important theory of cognitive linguistics. Conceptual integration refers to two input spaces are connected by partial cross-space mappings, and selectively projected to a blended space, where an emergent structure is formed through processes of composition, completion, and elaboration. Relevance theory, put forward by Sperber&Wilson, holds that communication is a kind of ostensive-inferential communication, and utterances of communicators are always relevant.In this thesis, the author tentatively proposes a new blending network model for interpreting parody. In this new model, five spaces are included:the original four spaces of Conceptual Integration network and a relevance space which is added according to Relevance Theory. The two theories supplement each other in the process of interpreting parody.This thesis analyzes several concrete examples of both Chinese and English advertisements. The dynamic on-line process of understanding parody is vividly illustrated. The advertiser firstly provides a stimulus to the customer by applying parody in the designed advertisement, which can be regarded as the ostensive behavior. Then it is the customer’s task to make inference in order to fulfill the communicative act. When encountering a parody, the customer would easily find out the parodied expression from his long-term memory because of similar pronunciation, similar structure or relevant semantic meaning between the parodied expression and the parodying one. Then he would make a set of contextual assumptions about the parodied expression and its context on the basis of his cognitive environment. These elements construct input1. Similarly, the assumptions about the parodying expression and the current context constitute input2. All the information chosen is relevant and helps to work out the communicative intentions. Then structures and elements in the inputs are selectively projected to the blend in which they are composed, completed and elaborated to create an emergent structure which contains the intended information the advertiser encodes. Thus the communicative intentions are successfully conveyed to the customer. Several unsuccessful examples are also displayed so as to make suggestions for the advertiser to design good advertisements.By adopting the blending model based on Conceptual Integration Theory and Relevance Theory, the author attempts to reveal the process of meaning construction and comprehension of parody, to prove the strong explanatory power of the theories adopted, as well as to help the advertisers master better employment of parody in designing advertisements.