Metaphor In Advertising--A Relevance-Theoretic Approach

Abstract In the modern world, advertising has penetrated into every corner of our life. To savespace or time and impress the consumers most in a condensed and effective way, theadvertisers apply metaphors in their advertisements. The present thesis will analyzemetaphors in advertising from the perspective of the relevance theory. The relevance theory, proposed by Sperber and Wilson in 1986, tries to analyzehuman communication from cognition. The relevance theory holds that humancommunication is an ostensive-inferential process, and that by producing an ostensivestimulus, the speaker makes it manifest to the hearer that on the one hand he has aninformative intention, to make manifest or more manifest to the hearer a set ofassumptions I; on the other hand, he has a communicative intention, to make it mutuallymanifest to the hearer and himself that he has this informative intention. The relevancetheory also argues that the ostensive stimulus comes with the presumption of optimalrelevance for the hearer. In this thesis, the author argues that the communication which occurs in advertising isostensive-inferential in nature, and that metaphors in advertising are used as ostensivestimuli to attract and hold the audience's attention to the advertiser's informativeintention. This thesis also tries to show how metaphors help the audience to recover theadvertiser's informative intention and acquire optimal relevance.