A Cognitive-Pragmatic Approach To Ontological Metaphor In English Advertisements

In the modern world, advertisements have penetrated into every corner of our life. And in order to save space or time and impress consumers effectively, advertisers prefer to apply metaphors in their advertisements. As a very common social phenomenon, many researches about advertisements have been carried out from different angles by linguists and scholars both at home and abroad. This thesis will mainly test the feasibility of a cognitive-pragmatic approach to ontological metaphor in English advertisements according to the classification of metaphors done by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.Unlike the traditional linguists who view metaphor as a means of rhetoric, Lakoff and Johnson hold that metaphor is a way of thought and a powerful tool of cognition. In their influential book Metaphors We Live By, they claim that metaphors are not just a way of expressing ideas by means of language, but a way of perceiving, thinking and acting and the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. The publication of Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson's collaboration Relevance: Communication and Cognition offers us a new perspective on the study of language communication. Relevance theory holds that human communication is an ostensive-inferential process. For the speaker, communication is an ostensive process in which he shows his informative intention, whereas communication is an inferential process to the hearer in which he infers the communicative intention of the speaker in accordance with the ostensive behavior of the speaker and contextual information.The author of this thesis argues that as a way of communication, metaphors used in advertisements can only be understood by considering the relevant contextual information. Metaphor is a way we think and act, but the understanding of metaphor depends on the contextual information which is intended to be optimally relevant; it is both a cognitive phenomenon and a pragmatic phenomenon. Therefore, it becomes possible to hypothesize that the cognitive theory of metaphor put forward by Lakoff and Johnson and the Relevance Theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson should be combined to study metaphor.With this assumption in mind, the author analyzes three kinds of ontological metaphor: entity and substance metaphors, container metaphors and personification metaphors on the basis of the research on 37 pieces of English advertisements. And the analysis further verifies the rationality of the assumption.It is the author's hope that this thesis will not only offer a new and practical perspective on interpreting metaphor, but also set an example for understanding metaphor in English Advertisements. Naturally, it will inspire us to take more interest in language study.