An Analysis Of Verbal And Pictorial Metaphors In English Advertising Within The Framework Of Relevance Theory

With the development of international trade and global economy, advertising has become an important part of international communication. To persuade people to buy their products in an effective way, the advertisers use metaphors in their advertisements. Metaphor is an important part of advertising language. Advertisers employ a lot of metaphors in advertisements to inspire the audience to work out their intended implicatures. By using metaphors advertisers can avoid exaggerating their products' certain functions and causing unnecessary dissensions since the audience takes a large part of responsibility for deriving the implicatures. This thesis aims at interpreting metaphors in advertising within the framework of the Relevance Theory.Sperber and Wilson proposed the Relevance Theory in their book Relevance: Communication and Cognition in 1986. The theory treats communication as a cognitive activity. It maintains that human communication is an ostensive-inferential process and human communication is governed by the principle of relevance: every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance.This thesis is a tentative study of metaphors in advertising within the framework of the Relevance Theory. It holds that communication in advertising is also communication involving ostension and inference, that metaphors in advertising are used as ostensive stimuli to attract the audience's attention and focus the audience's attention on advertisers' informative intentions. This thesis attempts to discuss how metaphors, including verbal and pictorial metaphors, help the audience to recover the advertiser's communicative intentions and acquire optimal relevance, thus showing that the Relevance Theory is a powerful tool for the interpretation of metaphors in advertising.