An Analysis Of Multimodal Metaphor In TV Commercials

Metaphor and advertizing are two attractive topics in both linguistic research and advertising study.Metaphor is an important cognitive tool as well as a common linguistic phenomena,and advertising is a symbol manifestation of all the products and service, which play a crucial role in business field and social life.Metaphor has been an important strategy in advertising design which provides products information and arouses the audience’s desire for buying the product, it influence the seller’s business,and also influence the public values. Metaphor in advertising is not just a linguistics phenomena and a form of communication, but also an aesthetic value guiderWith the development of information technology, communication mode have been changed for a long way,the new media catches people’s eye,and the visual images have been a main mode of language,what we call visual language.Also,the metaphor as a special language element, it changed from verbal metaphor, via pictorial metaphor to multimodal metaphor (Forceville,).in order to adapt to the visualizing trend, pictorial metaphor and multimodal metaphor have been widely used in advertising.One way for ad makers to increase the chance that the consumers’s eye will remain hook to their ad in the ocean of commercial message is to incorporate a striking picture, one way of ensuring this is to establish a metaphorical connection between the product and the person,thing,or activity suggested by the surprising picture or the unconventional text.Using a pictorial metaphor is thus an economical way of both attracting attention and making a positive claim about a product.(Charllice forceville,2006).As an mass communication behavior,advertising is a vital means to promote products and services especially when we refers to TV commercials. TV commercials’s most essential characteristics is that it combines different versions of pictorial image,music, text words, non-verbal sound and so on,giving the audience more imagination space, aesthetic feeling and association of ideals.Although we may find pictorial and multimodal metaphor used in many cases,but sometimes we can not judge or even understand them very well.Facing the a pictorial or a multimodal metaphor,different people have different interpretation, especially between people who live in different culture environment. What is a pictorial metaphor or multimodal metaphor? How does it constitute and works well? What respective we judge the effectiveness of a pictorial of multimodal metaphor? These are three core questions what the author need to study in this paper. Although the author can not provide a wonderful answer, effort will be made for giving some new perspectives.As a special form of communication, the multimodal metaphor was widely used in Internet, TV and other multimedia."Multimodal metaphor" to some extent is a new terminology in linguistics, which fathered by Charles Forceville.The great merit of lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors we Live by (1980)was its demonstration that metaphors are typically not creative one offs,but pervade language and thought.This view give a more extensive research space for metaphor.From the beginning of the end of nineteen nineties,taking Forceville as a group of leading scholarship draw nutrition from other discipline,dedicated to the study of conceptual metaphor has been confined to pure linguistics is extended to multimodal study platform for interdisciplinary.multimodal metaphor research focus mode itself and modal interaction value.As to the construction of multimodal metaphor, the thesis mainly under the conceptual blending theory frame work to analyses multimodal metaphors in TV commercials from dynamic perspective, analysis is based in a interdisciplinary perspective, refers to cognitive linguistics, communication,aesthetics. Through the analysis, the aim is twofold:(1)to further contribute to the theory of conceptual blending theory, use the analyzing of practicality example to enrich the corpus of multimodal metaphor study, and give the multimodal metaphors a interdisciplinary approach;(2)To provide a broader and comprehensive perspective for both the ad designer and the audience, to give a suggestion for the ad designer,meanwhile approve a appreciate attitude for the audience, because there is no doubt that the advertisement is a part of our modern life.