An Analysis Of The Persuasive Functions Of Public Service Advertisement Based On Conceptual Blending Theory

Since Fauconnier proposed Conceptual Blending Theory in the late1990s, thistheory has arouse many scholars’ interest because of its strong interpreting power andhas become one of the most important theories in the cognitive linguistics in the west.Fauconnier thought that the theory and its power of interpretation can be used toexplain all human cognitive activities.Public service advertisement is a special type of media. It is different fromcommercial advertisement. It mainly has three functions, such as communication,persuasive function and warning function. So many scholars study the language ofPSA from the perspectives of pragmatics, semantics and rhetoric. And there are alsosome people who use the conceptual blending theory to analyze the construction ofmeaning. But how to use conceptual blending theory to analyze persuasive functionneeds further study. And this paper mainly aims at how people use conceptualblending theory to analyze the persuasive function in PSA.In this paper, the author uses the conceptual blending theory to explain thepersuasive function through the four networks. The data the author uses are mainlyfrom China Daily, Times, Chinese Public web and WWW. And then the author classifies these PSA based on the type of persuasion and analyze the words andpictures through the four networks.