A Cognitive Analysis Of Ambiguities In Chinese Advertisements

Studies on cognitive environment have been of great concern ever since Sperber & Wilson (1986/2001). For the illusive properties of cognitive environment (CE), we can not provide a sound and scientific definition for it. What makes us excited is that there have been a lot of forerunners of great accomplishments in the studies on CE. They are Fauconnier, Fillmore, Lakoff, Minsky, etc. Their achievements in mental space, frame, and ICM provide solid theoretical basis for further classification of CE. Most of the relevant studies, home or abroad, are all based on their achievements. However, in our research we find that pure theoretical classification of cognitive environment is not pertinent in the analysis of decoding process of ambiguous advertisements. We hereby bring forward a new classification of CE from hearers' side. We classify it into situational knowledge and frames activated in hears' brain. In the second section of chapter two, more detailed classification of situational knowledge is explored and six kinds of mental frames are differentiated from two angles. Frame theory will be elaborated on because our later analysis of homographs in advertisements will be based on that. Finally in the preparation for the analysis of ambiguous advertisements, the explanation of accessibility theory is also indispensable.In the third part, we briefly review the studies on ambiguity, advertisements and ambiguous advertisements. The fourth part is the detailed cognitive analysis of the decoding process of ambiguous advertisements. In our research, there are mainly six kinds of ambiguities in Chinese advertisements, namely ambiguities caused by homophones, perfect homonyms, homographs, polysemes, syntactic ambiguities and ambiguities on discourse level. Different pieces of information of an advertisement are accessed in some order. If there is a marking scale, there should be some time-gaps between each two pieces of information. Advertisers are making use of these time-gaps and providing misleading information by employing ambiguity-causing factors in advertisements. The later accessed information will naturally break up the psychological expectation or bring forward a new understanding or understandings. In the final stage of the processing, audiences will compare this meaning or these meanings with the persuasive effect of advertisements. The positive one/ones will be retained in the working memory as the final understanding (s) while the one (s) that will not help enhance the persuasive effect will be regarded as disturbing factor(s) and abandoned. In the end of each section, a cognitive processing model will be constructed. The commonness of the decoding process of intended ambiguities will be summarized after previous analysis. What this paper aims to do is to offer a new perspective of classifying cognitive environment and to show that a target-oriented classification will be more powerful and pertinent in the study of language processing. Meanwhile, by analyzing the decoding process of these typical intended ambiguous advertisements, we are striving to construct a cognitive model for the decoding process of intended ambiguities.