A Study Of The Advertising Language From The Perspective Of Conceptual Integration Theory

In a broad sense, the advertisement can be divided into two categories: the commercialadvertisement and the public service advertisement. In a narrow sense, the advertisementmainly refers to the commercial advertisement. With the coming of the information age andthe further development of the market economy, the advertisement has become one of themain ways used by manufacturers to publicize their products, service or ideas.Advertisements become more and more important. As a crucial element of the advertisement,the advertising language, with its unique characteristics, vivid and persuasive functions, isdistinguished from the language family. As a matter of fact, the advertisement is more than amedium. It is a social and cultural phenomenon, whose forms and contents are stronglyimprinted with social and cultural marks. With time moving on, studies on the advertisinglanguage should also be updated constantly.Nowadays linguistic studies have come to the cognitive age. Cognitive linguistics is thenew direction of linguistics development. As one of the cognitive theories, ConceptualIntegration Theory (CIT) is also called Conceptual Blending Theory, which develops fromMental Space Theory, constantly completes and develops. Now with its systematic networkand powerful interpretation ability, CIT is highly spoken by scholars. With the help of CIT,this thesis aims to explore the interpretations and the characteristics of the advertisinglanguage.There are five parts in this thesis. Chapter one is the introduction part, includingbackground information of the study, necessity of the study, significance of the study andstructure of the whole thesis. Chapter two is the literature review. Firstly, the author reviewsthe theories and findings on the advertising language that have been made by otherresearchers. Secondly, the author introduces CIT, including its birth, development, key termsand networks. Chapter three is about the research questions and methodology. There are tworesearch questions of this study: first, how does the audience interpret advertising languagefrom the perspective of CIT? Second, what characteristics of advertising language can beidentified from the perspective of CIT? Self-made corpus is used for analysis. The data in thecorpus are collected by the author from July to September in2012. Chapter four is theanalysis and discussion part. CIT is combined with the advertising language. Chapter five isthe conclusion part. From the perspective of the integration network of CIT, the interpretationmodel of the advertising language follows four steps. Step1: building two input spaces. Step2: generic space mapping onto the two inputs. Step3: selective or partial projection from two inputs to the blend. Step4: running the blend. After composition, completion andelaboration mental activities, new meanings come into being in the emergent structure of theblend. With the help of four typical kinds of frame networks of CIT (the simplex framenetwork, the mirror frame network, the single-scope frame network and the double-scopeframe network), the author concludes the characteristics of the advertising language. Thecommercial advertising language often adopts the simplex frame network and thesingle-scope frame network, while the public service advertising language is balanceddistributed among the four kinds of frame networks.Within the framework of cognitive linguistic theory, this thesis is an empirical researchbased on real advertisements. It not only enriches the practical study of linguistics theories,but also provides an empirical example for future advertising researches. Meanwhile, theconclusions we draw may offer some help for advertising industry, advertising studies andadvertising education.