A Cognitive Study Of Commercial Advertisements From The Perspective Of The Conceptual Blending Theory

As a tool of spreading information to the public,advertisements can be divided into two categories:economic and non-economic.The former includes the multiple types of commercial advertisements,while the latter includes the public service advertisements,which are non-profit ones.This thesis focuses on commercial advertisements,which have been playing a crucial role in economic activities of the society.The problem of imbalance between supply and demand is not only determined by quantity,but also caused by consumers' lack of awareness of provider's products.Even if an advertisement has been widely known to the public,its effects or whether the information in it is properly delivered depends on many factors,such as the innovative idea of the ad designer,the channels of publicity,and the needs and economic conditions of the consumers.Creativeness is indispensable to a successful advertisement,and the accurate understanding of the ideas conveyed by the advertisements is important for the sale of the products.Through creatively integrating different elements,ad designers are able to bring a refreshing feeling to the consumers,and thus impress them favorably.There are various media available for communicating the ideas in advertisements,including the written language,sound,pictures,and video with both sound and pictures.This thesis concentrates on the analysis of the characteristics of the magazine advertisements,which depend on the language features,characters' actions and the colors of the scene to express their ideas.The study is based on the Conceptual Blending Theory put forward by the French cognitive linguists Fauconnier and Turner,and all the sample advertisements are collected from American weekly magazine,the Time.The thesis mainly answers the following questions:What is the effectiveness of the Conceptual Blending Theory in interpreting and analyzing the creative features in advertisements?How is the language processed through conceptual blending created at the levels of words,phrases and sentences in advertisements?What role does conceptual blending play in the interpretation of the verbal-visual relations in advertisements?In this study,the advertisements are first selected based on their creative content and classified at the levels of words,phrases and sentences,and from the visual-verbal dimension.This is followed by the analysis of the sample advertisements within the framework of the Conceptual Blending Theory to reveal how different elements in the commercial ads are integrated.Finally,conclusion is drawn from the study and more discussions are conducted concerning the problems in the application of conceptual blending to the study of advertisements.It is revealed through the study:the Conceptual Blending Theory has a profound power in interpreting advertising language and verbal-visual advertisements;the interpreting process can be applied to every aspect of the text at the levels of words,phrases and sentences,and the combination of verbal-visual factors;the Conceptual Blending Theory can be adopted to explain the production mechanism of new vocabulary;conceptual blending in phrases mainly originates from unconventional match of qualifiers and headwords;conceptual blending exists in certain sentence structures;and the relation between the text and the picture is complementary and shares the same semantic meaning.