Interpretation Of Cognitive Mechanism Of Metaphor In Dress Advertising-From The Perspective Of Conceptual Blending Theory

In recent years metaphor has become one of the most popular topics in many fields,such as linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science, and its research perspectivetrends to be more and more diversified. Learning on metaphor can help us have amore thorough understanding of metaphorical phenomena and at the meantimeconducive to improve human’s self-cognition and thinking system. Metaphor as akind of linguistic phenomenon and cognitive behavior, with its unique rhetoricalfunction and expressional effect has been widely applied in commercialadvertisement. Rich metaphorical language makes advertising more vivid,imaginative and full of fun, stimulating people’s desire to buy the promoted products.The meaning construction of metaphorical discourse is inseparable from cognitivetheories. Conceptual blending theory reveals the process of meaning construction ofnatural language; it has a great explanatory power on metaphors in advertising. Thedissertation on the basis of conceptual integration theory provides a systemframework for the analysis of metaphors in dress advertisements, and furtherexplores its cognitive mechanism so that people’s cognitive comprehension onmetaphors in advertising becomes more in-depth and thorough. The author of this paper has recently carried out a study on metaphor in dressadvertising, presenting an outlook of traditional and contemporary metaphorresearches from home and abroad, and some other important relevant theories onmetaphors in advertisement. The main idea of conceptual integration theory and themeaning formation process have been described and analyzed in details. The purposeof this paper is to give a specific analysis on the working mechanism of metaphorsfrom the perspective of conceptual blending theory, combined with examples ofdress advertisements. The research method adopted is the qualitative analysis, and allemployed data comes from network database and famous magazines in the past threeyears. It has been found that the operation mechanisms of metaphor in dressadvertising can be divided into three phases: construction of metaphor, recognition,and interpretation of metaphor; during the whole process, the visual image plays avital role in the interpretation of dress advertising. What’s more, some factorsaffecting the construction and understanding process of metaphor have been listedthrough the study of this research, so as to help advertisers create more effective andpowerful advertising strategies. At last, the result of the research can be clarified thatthe working mechanisms of metaphor in dress advertising are beyond the languagelevel, but activated by the language level.