A Cognitive Study Of Rhetorical Devices In Public Service Advertising Based On Relevance- Blending Model

Public service advertising (abbreviated as PSA) is a special form of verbal communication. It not only conveys targeted and appealing information which has sociality and humanity features, more importantly, it affects lifestyle, feelings, moral standards of audiences and make them continually control their thoughts and actions through vivid, ideological and artistic language forms. Therefore, all kinds of rhetorical devices are absolutely necessary during the process of public service advertising making. Previous researches on public service advertising mainly focus on the classification of rhetorical devices, violating of cooperative principle and politeness principle to produce rhetorical effects from the perspective of pragmatics. However, it is not profound enough to discuss the construction processes and cognitive reasoning mechanism of rhetorical meaning in public service advertising from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. Relevance Theory and Conceptual Blending theory are the two most widely used ones in explaining rhetorical meaning. Relevance Theory provides a general cognitive principle for the understanding of rhetorical meaning, while Conceptual Blending Theory systematically presents the meaning construction process through mapping and integration of mental spaces. But both of the two theories have certain defects in inference and meaning construction at cognitive level, they can integrate and make up for the defects of each other. Therefore, the author combines advantages of Relevance Theory and Conceptual Blending Theory in understanding metaphor, irony and other rhetorical methods and makes some necessary improvements of Relevance-Blending Model based on the studies of previous scholars and characteristics of advertising communication in order to interpret the rhetorical on-line meaning construction in public service advertising. The mental mechanism of the audience in understanding the emergent meaning is further demonstrated. Finally, through the understanding and analysis of meaning construction in public service advertising, cognitive factors affecting the application of rhetorical devices in Chinese PSA are put forward from the aspect of social and cultural psychology as well as individual psychology.The analysis of rhetorical meaning in public service advertising based on Relevance-Blending Model reveals the following findings:relevance and inference run through the whole process of comprehension and the relevance is the overall principle of this model. Advertisers put similar or contradictory information which belongs to the same reference in an ad with the intentions of catching audiences’ attention and achieve a perfect communicative effect. When audiences understand an ad, they can construct the mental spaces, namely input spaces in the model according to the external information of advertising language. Meanwhile, audiences activate cognitive context which is the most related to advertising language, namely cognitive context in prominence. And then the audiences combine the new information in input spaces and cognitive context in prominence. When new information is in conflict with the old information, the audiences will have the maximum relevance expectation. In blending space, audiences blend information in input spaces with his maximum relevance expectation. Driven by audience’s associative ability, especially the associative ability by similarity (simile, analogy) or associative ability by contrast (irony, hyperbole), they convert cognitive framework, activate and reorganize context to generate emergent structure. With the appearance of the emergent structure, the communicative effect of advertising can be sensed and the communicative intention of advertiser is realized. However, it needs to be noted that the meaning construction process of visual rhetoric is so complex that we should make a concrete analysis of each specific case and there are no clear boundary between different kinds of visual figure of speeches. Therefore, many factors should be considered, such as the cognitive principle, frame of culture, aesthetic standard to determine what kind of figure of speech is used in a PSA.As is illustrated by analysis of cognitive factors affecting the use of rhetorical devices in Chinese PSA, the creation of a successful advertisement relies on the typical social and cultural psychological features of that society. So it has to be consistent with the psychology of the whole nation so as to be completely accepted and understood by public. And in addition to compliance with common cognition, it also needs to meet individual psychological characteristics of the target audience with the intention of enriching creativity of advertising and making each audience benefit from the communication of public service advertising.Relevance-Blending Model as a creative cognitive-pragmatic working model provides a new perspective for the dynamic meaning construction of rhetorical meaning, which makes some positive and valuable contributions to the further study. The author also hopes that this thesis can offer more reference factors for PSA creation and further enhance the application value of theoretical research.