A Cognitive Study Of Advertisement Parody

As a linguistic device, parody usually takes advantage of some existing language forms to convey new information. Nowadays, it is more and more widely used as a strategy in the advertisements in different media such as newspapers, magazines, and TV commercials. Somehow, previous studies of parody mainly focus on its rhetoric function. However, the present study, based on two fundamental theories in cognitive linguistics-relevance theory and conceptual blending theory plus three accompanying key concepts, namely"conceptual blending","cognitive context"and"relevance"aims at a comprehensive interpretation of advertisement parody.This thesis consists of five chapters:Chapter One serves as a general introduction to the study. It includes the motivation, scope and purpose of the study, methodology, data collection and layout of the thesis.Chapter Two reviews the previous studies of advertisement parody from the perspective of rhetoric, semantics and cognitive linguistics. Efforts especially go to the discussion of the gaps found in the previous researches.Chapter Three, based on the limitations of the previous studies, a solution to the gaps is proposed—CBR model, which is employed as the theoretical framework of the thesis.Chapter Four includes data description, analysis and discussion. Firstly, data description is presented; secondly, the generation and interpretation mechanism of advertisement parody is comprehensively analyzed and discussed in line with CBR from the perspective of phonetics, semantics, pragmatics and cognitive linguistics.Chapter Five draws a conclusion and lists the contributions of the thesis as follows:1. Proposing a CBR analytical model based on the Conceptual Blending Theory and Relevance Theory in Cognitive Linguistics, and applying it as the theoretical framework to the analysis and discussion of the generation and interpretation mechanism of advertisement parody from the perspective of phonetics, semantics, pragmatics and cognitive linguistics.2. Discussing briefly the maxims concerning successful employment of advertisement parody via the CBR framework.