A Cognitive Approach To Metaphors In English And Chinese Cosmetic Advertisements

Metaphor has been a hot focus to scholars both at home and abroadfor a long time. More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle had adetailed description of the metaphor system in his Rhetorics and Poetics,which said that metaphor acts mainly as a modifier. This traditionalrhetoric view deeply influenced further studies. In1980s, Lakoff andJohnson clearly put forward in their book Metaphors We Live By thatmetaphor is not only a rhetoric method, but also a way of thinking forhuman beings to better know the world. From then on, more and morescholars began to study metaphor from the perspective of cognition.With the development of globalization and culture progress,advertisements are prevalent in our daily life. What’s more, with thecontinuous development of the social status of women, cosmeticadvertisements become colorful, in which metaphors have been widelyused. This thesis selects Vogue(English version in2013), a popularfashion magazine both at home and abroad, and瑞丽(Chinese versionin2013) for comparative study. It conducts from the perspective ofcognition, applying theory of conceptual metaphors to do qualitative andquantitative analysis in Chinese and English cosmetic advertisementsrespectively. Firstly, the author classifies Chinese and English cosmeticadvertisements by adopting qualitative method, summarizing cosmetic advertisements into three categories, namely structural metaphor,orientational metaphor and ontological metaphor. Secondly, the authorcompares statistics of different categories of cosmetics by usingquantitative method. Finally, the author analyses the causes of similaritiesand differences of the frequency. The aim of the thesis is to understandthe differences and similarities between Chinese and English cosmeticadvertisements, providing more corpura for further studies and also canmake consumers know better about cosmetics through advertisements.