A Cross-Cultural Comparative Study Of Conceptual Metaphors In English And Chinese Commercial Advertisements

Advertising is an exhibition of socioeconomic backgrounds and cultural achievements, and it is the material culture created by mankind. Advertising plays an increasingly important role in promoting the development of commodity economy and culture. Metaphor is widely used in advertising creation in order to enhance the appeal and expressive effect of advertising.The study of metaphor has been the focus for linguists both at home and abroad. At present, the views of metaphor can be divided into the traditional view of metaphor and the cognitive view of metaphor. In 1980, in Lakoff and Johnson’s book Metaphors We Live By, they put forward the conceptual metaphor, they think that people’s thinking is metaphorical to some extent. The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing another thing with one thing. Lakoff divides conceptual metaphors into three categories:structural metaphors, orientational metaphors and ontological metaphors. Scholars mainly study the metaphors in advertising from the perspectives of rhetoric, semantics, pragmatics and cognitive linguistics at home and abroad.The relationship between metaphor, thinking and culture is complementary and inseparable. Quantitative and qualitative methods are mainly adopted in this thesis. The author will analyze the applications of conceptual metaphors in the Chinese and English commercial advertisements under the framework of cognitive metaphor theory and explore the similarities and differences of metaphors in English and Chinese commercial advertisements and analyze the cultural factors which influence the differences between Chinese and English. Self-made corpus is used for the analysis and all the English and Chinese commercial advertisements used in this thesis are collected from the famous magazines at home and abroad, which are published in 2014 and 2015, including 200 English advertisements and 200 Chinese ones.This thesis is made up of five parts. The first part is the introduction to the background of the study, and it introduces the purpose and significance of this study. The second part introduces the history and development of metaphor and the current situation of the study of metaphor in English and Chinese commercial advertisements. The third part is the theoretical foundation of this thesis, which mainly introduces the basic theories of metaphor from the traditional view and cognitive point of view. These theories provide the important theoretical support for the following chapters. The fourth part uses the actual cases to illustrate how the conceptual metaphor achieves its functions in advertising, and it sums up the similarities and differences of metaphors between English and Chinese commercial advertisements and make an analysis of cultural factors which lead to differences in English and Chinese metaphors. The fifth part is the summary of the thesis and it also points out the limitations of the study in order to further research and exploration.Advertising is closely related to us, and it is an integral part of our ordinary life. With the fast development of economy, large multinational companies actively expand their international business; cultural exchanges between countries have been gradually strengthened. And a growing number of English advertisements will come into our sights, which will gradually influence our culture and appreciation. Thus the author hopes that this thesis will help the advertisers to create more attractive and impressive advertisements, promote the development of advertising and improve the language learner’s ability to comprehend and appreciate advertisements.