A Study Of Metaphor In Internet Advertorials From The Perspective Of Cognitive Linguistics

Compared with traditional advertisements,advertorials,though still for the purpose of advertising and marketing,can hide commercial intentions well by covert advertising expressing forms and unconsciously influence the audience.In recent years,academia pays increasing attention to advertorials,researching them from the perspectives of advertising,public relations or advertising psychology.And there are plenty of studies about traditional ads in linguistics,which mainly explore their rhetorical and pragmatic effects,while linguists have seldom studied advertorials enough from the view of rhetorics or pragmatics,especially the cognitive effects of such newly-born advertorials.This thesis analyzes and discusses the features of metaphor use,the creation of metaphors as well as the cognitive effects of metaphors in Internet advertorials from the perspective of Conceptual Blending Theory,in order to explain how advertorials express their advertising intentions and lead audience unconsciously to accept or support the brands and their products by metaphors.The research object is advertorials published on the official web-blog of Bai Que Ling—the well-known domestic skin-care brand and the corpus consists of text(80),picture(86)and video(1)Internet advertorials.According to collected data the corpus is established.Based on Lakoff &Johnson's classification of metaphors,the thesis applies Conceptual Blending Theory to analyze and discuss the creation of word metaphors,uses Relevance Theory to explain picture metaphors and interprets video metaphors in advertorials according to the definition and features of multi-modal metaphors as well as Conceptual Blending Theory.It is found that there exist certain cognitive effects of metaphors in Internet advertorials on audience: for word metaphors,advertorials try to blend known and popular concepts for audience into metaphors.In order to shorten the mental distance between audience and the brand and its product,ad designers use a large number of Ontology Metaphors,namely Personification Metaphors,Entity and Substance Metaphors as well as Container Metaphors.Those metaphors establish different dynamic mutual cognitive relationships with audience,such as the personified social relationship between products and skin.The use of cross-gender metaphors breaks audience's cognition of skin-care advertisements being femininity.Moreover,thedynamic metaphorized relations among nouns draw the vivid cognitive image schema for audience.And from the collection and analysis of word metaphors,it can be seen that as for the part of speech metaphors in advertorials,there appear lots of noun metaphors(49)and verb metaphors(48)in the collected data(80).Verb metaphors bring audience dynamic cognitive effects and establish dynamic relationship among nouns;picture metaphors and word metaphors are related to each other and influence each other,which reduces the cognitive effort of audience's interpreting advertorials and offers audience multi-modal cognitive stimulus;finally,the video advertorials aim to express the soft culture of the brand,in which the conceptual metaphorized system in visual and auditory modes cooperates with each other along with the development of the plot and also gives audience multi-sensory cognitive influence.In conclusion,Internet advertorials hide ad intention and commercial aims by different metaphor creation and metaphor cooperation,blending known and popular information or concepts into metaphors.Such a metaphor use makes advertorials special and different from traditional ads,reducing audience's antipathy to ads as well as evoking their common feelings and cognition.