| Advertisement as a product of complex communicative, informative and persuasive process has penetrated into every field of our life. A successful advertisement can stir consumers’ mental associations with visual or interactive level, stimulating their purchasing desire by indirect persuasion eventually. Therefore, how the advertisers apply language skills to intriguing consumers’ curiosity among numerous advertisements,dragging more consumers to buy their products and how the consumers smoothly interpret them are essential to the survival of business.In this thesis, the author strives to analyze the online meaning construction process of some typical commercial advertisements in Mercedes-Benz and Audi using Conceptual Integration Theory by qualitative research approach to reveal the dynamic cognitive mechanism of natural language. The detailed analysis on commercial advertisement is carried out based on four integration networks proposed by Fauconnier and Turner and the author attempts to work out the following three questions:(1) What is the process of understanding commercial advertisement from the perspective of Conceptual Integration Theory?(2) How do the four types of conceptual integration networks work in the process of commercial advertisement meaning construction?(3) What are the factors that influence the understanding of meaning construction in commercial advertisement?Within the framework of Conceptual Integration Theory, four mental spaces: input 1,input 2, generic space and blended space are involved when people interpret commercial advertisement and meaning construction process can be considered as the mapping of the four mental spaces. Though the four integration networks work in different ways, they do help understand the process of meaning construction. Through analysis, this thesis finds out that the factors like mental context, cultural model and individual cognitive abilities have played a significant role in helping the consumers interpret commercial advertisement deeply. The awareness of these factors will definitely enhance the understanding of commercial advertisement. Meanwhile, the author believes that learning some relevant knowledge about this theory will not only help consumers to make better choices in purchasing, but help the advertisers to know the backstage cognitive process and raise the quality of their advertisement. Hopefully, this thesis will shred some light on the use and application of Conceptual Integration Theory in a broader field. |
