A Cognitive Approach To English And Chinese Brand Names

As a special linguistic phenomenon, the brand name, an essential component of advertisement, has aroused linguists' interest as well as that of economists. But what most scholars have done is just describing the linguistic phenomenon, rather than explaining the underlying cognitive mechanisms. Even their accounts for the motivations of brand names are not thorough or systematic enough to help a good understanding of them.Owing to the limitations of the previous studies and the significance of brand names in the market economy, this thesis turns to the theories of metaphor and metonymy and attempts to make a cognitive study of English and Chinese brand names with the method of contrast, so as to theoretically prove the great explanatory power of the two cognitive devices (metaphor and metonymy) and to provide a theoretical guide for stimulating the globalization of Chinese brand names.The author strongly believes that brand names are cognitive phenomena as well as social ones. Approaching English and Chinese brand names from a cognitive stance, the thesis aims at exploring the cognitive psychology of English and Chinese people in brand naming, to a great extent, i.e., the similarity between English and Chinese brand names.After reviewing the existing research on the topic and pointing out such common features of both English and Chinese brand names as their historical evolution, basic functions and classifications, the thesis observes that they both have experienced three stages, i.e., the proper name stage, the common word stage, and the coined word stage, and then can be divided into three corresponding types. The basic functions brand names serve are Identification, Information, Quality and Advertising, of which the last has become the most important, nowadays.As a linguistic phenomenon, the brand name reflects the nature of human language and thought, though it is a nutshell. Through detailed research into English and Chinese brand names with the cognitive theories of metaphor and metonymy, the author finds the Producing and Advertising ICMs are two main idealized cognitive models involved in both English and Chinese brand naming, providing a rather systematic account for various motivations of brand names. Conceptual metonymies employed in the Producing ICM such as PRODUCING PLACE FOR PRODUCT, MATERIAL FOR PRODUCT and PRODUCER FOR PRODUCT account for most proper name brand names from the producer, the inventor and the producing place and some common word brand names from the material. As noticing brand names become an increasingly important means of advertising with the economic development, the author then draws attention to entities in the Advertising ICM, especially the relationship between the brand name of the product, the consumer and the advertiser, discovering that it is the interaction between the conceptual GRABBING metonymy and conceptual INTEREST metaphors that makes the product advertised desirable, leading to the product purchase. This very cognitive psychological process makes both English and Chinese people tend to choose proper names with special significance, common words with favorable connotations, and even coined words with no explicit meaning, but with particular pronunciations or beautiful symmetric figurations.As a social phenomenon, the brand name is no doubt influenced by the cultural background of different peoples. Culture, on which metaphoric and metonymic expressions in brand names are based, determines what metonymies and metaphors are to be selected and which attributes in the source domain are to be foregrounded and then mapped onto the target domain. Chapter 4, therefore, discusses the cultural impacton brand names in terms of different symbols, heroes, social evolution and history, beliefs and values according to the manifestations of culture embodied in English and Chinese brand names, which are most likely to result in the major differences between them.