Metaphor In English Commercial Advertisement-A Speech Act Approach

Metaphor, as a prevailing rhetoric, has already penetrated our daily life as a basic fact of life. The history of the study of metaphor has been generally classified into three stages: the rhetorical stage, the structural and semantic stage, and the multidisciplinary stage. Until now, metaphor has been analyzed syntactically, semantically, cognitively, and pragmatically. Based on the existing achievements of the study of metaphor in recent years, the pragmatic function of metaphor has dramatically drawn our attention.A speech act approach is taken in this paper based on two points: First, the speech act approach in the paper emphasizes that metaphor can be used as a speech act; Second, the communicative effect of metaphor in communication process is the key to interpreting metaphor, emphasizing the responses of the target audiences in a specific context.The aim of this paper is to study how the communicative effect of metaphor takes effect in commercial advertisement and how to realize it.A four-level analyzing model of metaphor has been presented in this paper. The model has its continuity and incontinuity. The former implies that each speech act may have its four levels: the locutionary act, the propositional act, the illocutionary act, and the perlocutionary act, and people can perform all of these four levels at a time. The latter implies that the illocutionary act or perlocutionary act of metaphor can only take effect in particular contexts with corresponding responses from the target audiences. It is largely due to cultural differences, context features such as the field and the topic of a specific context, the quantity of the information in a context, and theknowledge schemata of a human being.The following aspects based on four-level analyzing model of metaphor were discussed:First, the identification of using metaphor as a speech act; second, a four-level analysis of metaphor in commercial advertisement: the analysis of the locutionary act, the propositional act, the illocutionary act, and the perlocutionary act; third, an effect analysis of metaphor in commercial advertisement: the realization of the illocutionary effect and the perlocutionary effect; last, some suggestions for modern English commercial advertisement.With such a speech act approach, the communicative effect of metaphor has been illustrated as an effective way to realize the communicative effect of commercial advertisement. The value lies in that it can offer some suggestions for modern commercial advertisement.Furthermore, such an attempt can be still found in many other communicative processes, whether linguistic or non-linguistic, such as commercial negotiation, teaching, writing, painting, playing, etc.