A Study On Metaphor In Advertisements From The Memetic Perspective

Metaphor has been receiving much more attention since it was created, whosedevelopment has undergone several phases, such as the rhetoric, semantics, semiotics,pragmatics, cognitive linguistics and so on. In recent years, metaphor is usually viewed as thedevice of human’s thoughts and the way to cognize the world. However, the previous studiesmainly focus on the understanding of metaphor, the transmitting system seldom beingmentioned. Memetics is a new pragmatic theory rising in recent years. It is based on theevolution theory of Darwin, the core of which is the meme. Meme is a basic unit of thedevelopment and evolution of the culture. It has life circle, the replication and tra nsmissionbeing its primary features. A successful meme has three features: longevity, fecundity andcopying-fidelity.In the present thesis, the corpuses are adopted from the advertisements containingmetaphors and they are analyzed through qualitative method from the memetic perspective.First of all, through analyzing the similarities between the meme and metaphor, the memeticmetaphor is summarized. Then, metaphors in advertisements are analyzed on the basis of thereplication and transmission pattern of meme. Through the research, it can be concluded thatmetaphor can be considered as a kind of meme because there are similarities between them;memetic metaphor has the features of the meme and goes through four stages during theprocess of replication and transmission: assimilation, retention, expression and transmission.In the assimilation stage, the memetic metaphor will be perceived and understood on theexperiential basis. Usually, it is considered that the more similar of the memetic metaphor tothe host’s cognitive experience, the more likely it is to be assimilated. In the retention stage,the memetic metaphor will be memorized and stored in the memory. Longer time usuallymeans more possibilities to transmit the meme. In the expression stage, the host will attemptto express it out through various means, i.e. to transform it from an abstract concept to a concrete concept, an entity or substance. After being expressed, it enters into the transmissionstage. The memetic metaphor can be transmitted through various media, such as utterances,pictures, videos, and so forth. In addition, there are mainly two ways to replicate and transmitmemetic metaphor: memetic genotype transmission and memetic phenotype transmission.The application of memetics to study metaphor can not only provide a new perspective for thestudy on metaphor but also broaden the research in memetic field，providing some value andreferences for future study.