A Study On Conceptual Metaphors In English Commercial Advertisements

Advertising, especially commercial advertising plays a quite important role in people’s daily life. It provides a way for people to acquaint the latest information in technology, culture, etc. What is more important is that it is one of the most important ways for advertisers to inform consumers and persuade them to buy the products or service. As the society develops, the way of using language in commercial advertising is continuously updated and a lot of excellent metaphorical expressions appear in commercial advertising. This highly attracts consumers’ attentions and achieves the marketing purpose.Metaphor was first regarded as a rhetorical device in experts’ researches. In 1980, the book Metaphors We Live By written by Lakoff and Johnson came out, in which the conceptual metaphor theory was proposed. And metaphor was promoted to the level of cognition. According to Lakoff and Johnson, metaphor is not only in language scope, but also in the scope of thought. Conceptual metaphor is a kind of systematical mapping from a concrete domain to an abstract domain. The nature of the metaphor is conceptual.In this thesis, the conceptual metaphor, which has been divided into three types: structural metaphor, orientational metaphor and ontological metaphor, is taken as the theoretical basis and foundation. The qualitative method is adopted as the study method in this thesis. The author analyzes three types of conceptual metaphors separately in two kinds of English commercial advertising: verbal advertising and pictorial advertising. Through the analysis of working mechanism and meaning configuration process of conceptual metaphors in English commercial advertising, the author highlights the experiential basis during the cognitive process by consumers and claims that three types of conceptual metaphors have different features and functions which can be applied to different kinds of advertising accordingly. Thus with the research findings, the thesis is aiming to provide some theoretical help, on one hand, for advertisers to produce more creative advertising with attractive metaphorical languages, so that to realize the informing and persuasive functions; and on the other hand, for consumers to understand the information delivered by the advertising easily.