The Conceptual Blending Mechanism In The Construction Of The Metaphorical Meanings Of Advertising Language

Metaphor is pervasive phenomenon in our daily life. This thesis holds that nature of metaphor is a cognitive activity of human beings. Modern people are exposed to multifarious advertising, and find metaphor is used widely in advertising at the same time. It is especially worthwhile investigating the reasoning mechanism of metaphorical meanings in advertising. This paper employs mental spaces theory and conceptual blending theory to explain the construction of metaphorical meaning in advertising language.Through reviews of previous studies, it is found out that advertising discourse analyses are based on stylistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics and systemic-functional grammar. And approaches to metaphor are generally from rhetorical and semantic perspectives. Among those studies, few are from the cognitive perspective; even fewer are the studies focusing on the construction of metaphorical meaning in advertising. With the development of cognitive linguistics,advertising has come to be seen as creative uses of language and there is cognitive motivation between the metaphorical meaning of the advertising and the literal meaning of the component parts.At first, by contrasting conceptual metaphor theory, this thesis shows that conceptual blending theory does better in describing the dynamic processes of reasoning meaning construction in metaphors, through mapping and projection within input spaces, generic space and blending space. “Blending is conceived as an online process, which allows us to combine conceptual material with astonishing speed, fluency and freedom”(Grady: 2005), emergent meaning evolves out of inferential processes. These help audience to understand the intrinsic meanings of an advertisement. As a creativity mechanism, conceptual blending theory also provides a new and detailed look at metaphorical creativity in advertising.This paper proves that mental spaces theory and conceptual blending theory can further analyze the construction of the metaphorical meaning in advertising language with case analyses in four basic networks: simplex network, mirror network, single-scope network and double network. Combining features of advertising language and results of case analyses, the author discussed particularities of metaphors in advertising language from three aspects: a. elements and frameworks integrated into the blend space have selectivity; b. similarity of metaphor in advertising language is prominent; c. the principle of economy is followed in metaphorical expression.And then, an individual interview on the basis of the four advertising cases was conducted among 30 students(21 females, 9 males), who are from different grades at a university in northeast China. This interview further proves the feasibility that conceptual blending theory can be used to explain the construction of the metaphorical meaning,and the possibility that three features exist in the metaphors in advertising language.Finally, the major findings of this thesis indicate that conceptual blending get better at reasoning novel and dynamic metaphor, particularly advertising metaphor. Mental spaces theory and conceptual blending theory can explain the metaphorical meaning construction in advertising. There are three particularities of metaphors in advertising language: selectivity, similarity, economy principle, and they in accord with the functions of advertising.