Meaning Construction Of Advertising Slogan In The Framework Of Conceptual Blending Theory

Language inquiry is turning to meaning at this era,and meaning construction is a big issue in language meaning inquiry.Conceptual Blending Theory is powerful in exploring language meaning.With the adventure of the fourth revolution of science and technology,human society is relying more and more on such technologies as artificial intelligence(AI).Natural language processing(NLP)technology,including semantic recognition and semantic feature extraction,is crucial to AI.Development of these technologies depends on language meaning research fruits.So,language meaning researches benefit not only linguistics,but also fields beyond.Advertising slogan plays a huge role in its second time transmission,and researches of the meaning construction of advertising slogan is supposed to benefit advertising slogan design and its second time transmission.Literature reviews suggest that existing researches confine the study on meaning construction of advertising slogan to defining the content in mental spaces,and leave the research of mapping and compression between elements in the mental spaces to be further studied.Besides,existing researches limit meaning construction of advertising slogan to one type of Conceptual Integration Network(CIN).This is worthy of discussion.Therefore,this study has put forward two researches questions,1.How is the meaning of advertising slogan constructed?2.Can meaning construction of one advertising slogan be based on more than one type of CIN? These two research questions aims to discover the conceptual blending mechanism behind advertising slogan construal.Given that most existing researches apply introspective research methodology,this study has used semi-structured interviews to collect authentic construal data.The study has been conducted in three steps,first,semi-structured interview outline has been designed.The outline requires interviewees to construe 10 advertising slogans.Second,semi-structured interviews have been conducted.There are totally 36 interviewees been interviewed,and they vary in backgrounds of gender,educational degree,status of being a student or a labor in society,and the places where they come from.Third,data have been analyzed in the framework of Conceptual Blending Theory in terms of mental space,mapping,compression,and conceptual integration network involved in construal.For the first research question,how is the meaning of advertising slogan constructed,research findings show that meaning construction of advertising slogan is a conceptual blending process which involves mapping and compression between commodities,consumers and things evoked by advertising slogan,as well as different types of CIN.To be detailed,mental spaces in meaning construction of advertising slogan involves contents of spokesman,advertising video,commodities under advertising,contents evoked by individual words and expressions in the slogan rather than the whole language structure.Mappings involved in the meaning construction of advertising slogan include projection mapping and pragmatic function mapping.For projection mapping,interviewees frequently use one domain to construe the other,among the domains of commodities,consumers and things evoked by the slogan.Pragmatic function mapping involves the use of the commodities,as a part of its owner,to represent the owner as a whole.This is a typical synecdoche which uses a part to talk about the whole.Compression in advertising slogan construal frequently operates along the vital relation of similarity and cause-effect.Compression along similarity is common to see in the compression between commodities and consumers,and compression along cause-effect is common to see in the compression between commodities and their functions.For the second research question,can meaning construction of one advertising slogan be based on more than one type of CIN,the answer is yes.In this study,45.9% meaning construction is based on simplex network,16.8% mirror network,19.7% single-scope network and 17.6% double-scope network.With the tool SPSS V.21,one-way analysis of variance between CIN and interviewee factors including gender,educational degree,and status are conducted,and results show that educational degree and status shows impact on CIN,while gender shows no impact.Findings of this study are supposed to benefit the understanding of the meaning construction of advertising slogan,to provide some data support to Conceptual Blending Theory,and to provide some linguistic reference for advertising slogan design.