A Contrastive Studv Of Conceptual Metaphor In English And Chinese Pro-environmental Public Service Advertising

Metaphor has been a major theme of Linguistics, just as Public Service Advertising has for Advertising study. Metaphor is not only a common language phenomenon, but an essential way of cognition. As a higher level of advertising, PSA obtains the attention of the audience by conveying persuasive information with purpose of publicity and influence. Metaphors in PSA language can stimulate people’s imagination and resonation so as to influence people’s thoughts and behaviors. For its most intensive contact with people and far-reaching influence, Pro-environmental PSA has been widely adopted to spread environmental issues to arouse the public’s awareness of environmental protection with the ultimate goal of guiding the public to join the environment protecting activities.The study of metaphor has been a hot topic focused by linguists. According to the traditional metaphor theories, metaphor is a kind of language phenomenon, a rhetorical device used as an ornament. With the development of Cognitive Linguistics, metaphor research has been taken to a new world. Metaphor study has never been restricted to the rhetoric research, but taken as a kind of cognitive tool employed to perceive the world and reveal the most essential relationship between language and thought. Therefore, with the theoretical framework of Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Fauconnier and Turner’s Conceptual Blending Theory, the thesis makes a comparison of the conceptual metaphors in English and Chinese Pro-environmental PSA from the perspective of cognition with the combination of static and dynamic ways to obtain cognitive differences between different nations by revealing the meaning construction and working mechanism of metaphor.The thesis takes the Pro-environmental PSAs released in the latest decade from 2002 to 2012 as the research subject. The corpus involves both the verbal metaphors and pictorial metaphors. The corpus in the thesis is mainly collected from two sources. One is the most influential official websites home and abroad, such as Net of China PSA (http://www.cnpad.net/), Ad Council (http://www.adcouncil.org/), which provides on-line base for PSA exhibition and academic exchange. The second is the websites of the predominant non-profit environmental protection organizations, such as World Wide Fund for Nature (http://worldwildlife.org/), Green Peace Organization (http://www.greenpeace.org) and The Natural Resources Defense Council (http://www.nrdc.org/). Due to their deep concern with environment protecting, close connection to the government and their high audience rating, their PSAs can be viewed as representatives of PSAs because of their production values and concerns with social issues. Based on the analysis of the corpus, the thesis clarifies the influence of cultural consistency and cultural variation in metaphor perceiving, hoping to supplement the present linguistic studies on English and Chinese PSAs and arouse in the public the cultural awareness of PSA so as to promote the cultural communication and integration of PSA between East and West.