Application Of Metaphor In English Car Advertising

Previous researchers at home and abroad mainly drew their attention to studies on external forms of ads. Audience's thinking processes of ads were not systematically explained. In recent years, the study of ads from a cognitive perspective is promising. It is meaningful to explore ad receivers'transference of their cognition as a result of the realization of promotion.Metaphor focused on by cognitive linguistics is widely used in advertising communication between advertisers and audience and makes the communication occur successfully. The analysis of metaphors in ads will show us functions of metaphor in advertising discourse. In traditional point of view, metaphor was taken as a language phenomenon; while cognitive linguists consider metaphor, which is pervasive in our ordinary language, as an important mechanism of cognition and a mode of thinking of human beings on conceptual level.In this thesis, car ads have been chosen for study because of car's familiarity and extensively symbolic reference. This study takes a qualitative method. Most data are obtained from an internet database. For enrichment, others are picked up from popular English magazines. On the basis of contemporary metaphor theory and collected data, it attempts to make a systematic examination of metaphors in car advertising discourse from a cognitive aspect.This thesis firstly introduces the origin, purpose and significance, methodology, scope and theory of the research, and structure of this thesis. Then it reviews previous studies on metaphor, including traditional and contemporary researches, which sets a solid theoretical foundation for the following discussion.The third and the fourth chapters are cores of this thesis, which serve the purpose of showing how advertisers reach their selling goals by the use of metaphors. The third chapter discusses the existence of conceptual metaphor in English car ads, analyzes its characteristics with conceptual metaphor theory (abbreviated as CMT), and elucidates the audience's metaphorical thinking while they are interpreting car ads with conceptual blending theory (abbreviated as CBT). There are some findings: (1) Conceptual metaphors are ubiquitous in car ads. Source domains mainly focus on human beings, animals, buildings, animate things (whose species are not pointed out), art, natural objects, space and a container. Novel metaphors rather than conventional ones have more preference in advertising context, which stand out to explain specific characteristics and functions of cars and attract addressees'attention; (2) compared with CMT, CBT plays a more important role in the analysis of an addressee'thinking processes of car ads. Consequently, cognitive efforts deepen our impressions on the advertising products. The fourth chapter probes the functions of metaphors in English car ads from cognitive, pragmatic and discourse perspectives. In the case of cognition, metaphor has the potential for influencing our understanding and judgment. Our physical embodiment provides the basis of creating and interpreting car ads. On the level of pragmatics, metaphor is helpful to success in communicative intention. The application of a series of metaphors arouses an addressee's beautiful imagination. From the angle of discourse, metaphor is an important implicit mechanism of realizing cohesion and coherence of advertising discourse. It is an invisible chain constructing and organizing the whole discourse.The fifth chapter reports what have been found from the research, draws conclusions, points out the weak points of the research, and directs future research.The study has been an attempt to offer help to the audience and language learners in their correct interpretation of ads and also give enlightenment for the study of metaphors from a new sight of discourse.