An Analysis Of The Communicative Effect Of Multimodal Metaphor In Graphic Ad Design From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

With the advent of the Internet plus era and the development of cultural communication,advertising in all kinds of platforms has been playing an increasingly important part in establishing commercial awareness and prompting international business.However,in the times of information explosion and flooding of products,advertising is rather redundant and people are more frequently exposed to advertisement in different models.As one of the marketing methods,how graphic ad design can better attract consumers' attention,effectively and creatively transmit the information and achieve ideal communicative effect has become so valuable from both marketing and communicative perspectives.In 1986,Sperber and Wilson published their book:Relevance: Communication and Cognition,which maintains that communication is a cognitive process involving ostensive-inferential process and that communication is governed by the principles of relevance;hence the Relevance Theory.The thesis takes Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory as the theoretical framework and tries to discuss how multimodal metaphors in graphic ad designs conform with the cognitive and communicative principles and help the audience to get the advertiser's communicative intentions and obtain optimal relevance,which shows that the Relevance Theory,as a powerful tool of the interpretation of metaphors in advertising provides another perspective for advertisement design and graphic ad design appraisal in advertisement festivals.The thesis adopts the methods of qualitative and case study,collects 46 awarded graphic ad designs which won the Grand Prix in the print and publishing category of Cannes Lions International Advertising Festivals from 2004 to 2017 from the website WELOVEAD(http://www.welovead.com/cn/).Through the analysis and investigation,the author has made the following major findings: Firstly,in ostensiveinferential model,the advertiser is the communicator who employs multimodal metaphor as an ostensive stimulus to catch the audience's attention and the audience is the addressee who makes inferential process about the intention of the advertisement.The audience will find resemblances between the promoted term and the object featured in the different types of multimodal metaphor;then,the audience will construct relevant assumptions,and finally,the communicative intention is achieved.Secondly,the advertisers use multimodal metaphors in graphic ad designs and make the information relevant enough for the audience and fit his cognitive environment.It is supposed that the multimodal metaphor is relevant enough to be worth the audience's efforts to process it,then,the audience will try to find an interpretation for the metaphors that accord with the principle of relevance.The thesis may be enlightening to the advertiser and the audience.It may help the audience promote cognitive efficiency and understand multimodal metaphorical advertisements better and help advertisers make a better application of different types of metaphors in advertisements to create more attractive,more creative,more successful advertisements.