Understanding Metaphors In English Commercial Advertisements From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

In modern society, with the development of economy and media, commercial advertisements have become an important component in people’s daily life. So advertising has already been the influential communication means in nowadays and played a crucial role in people’s life. Since a lot of linguistic devices, especially metaphor, have been used in advertisements, this thesis aims to analyze metaphors in English commercial advertisements from the perspective of Relevance Theory, which provides a new theoretic perspective to the study.Relevance Theory was put forward by Sperber and Wilson in 1986, which is based on Grice’s cooperative principle and it is a further criticism and development of conversational implications. Relevance theory holds that communication is one ostensive-inferring behavior which is a process to search for optimal relevance. This view tries to analyze utterance from a pragmatic and cognitive perspective. Also, Relevance Theory has provided a strong explanatory to metaphors. And the interpretation of metaphor is also a process to search for optimal relevance.In this study, the author selects two hundred English commercial advertisements which are metaphorically expressed from the magazine Time and The Economist as the data of this thesis. The author intends to find out the features and the functions of metaphors in commercial advertisements through exploring the research questions:(1) How to apply ostensive-inferential model to interpret metaphors in commercial advertisements?(2) What are the features of metaphors in advertising language?(3) What are the functions of metaphors in commercial advertisements?The author explicates three main parts in the process of interpreting metaphors in commercial advertisements in detail from the perspective of Relevance Theory in chapter four. The first part is to employ ostensive-inferential communication to gain mutual manifestness between the advertiser and the reader. The second part is to employ cognitive context to establish context in commercial advertisements. The third part is to employ optimal relevance and implicatures to derive implicit meaning in commercial advertisements. The discussions about the use of metaphors in advertisements are presented in chapter five. It talks about features and functions of metaphors in commercial advertisements based on Relevance Theory. The features of metaphors in commercial advertisements are conciseness and informativity, creativity and cultuality. The functions of metaphor in commercial advertisements are attention appealing, information transmitting, desire stimulating and purchase persuading. At last, the author concludes the major findings and limitations of the study and then makes suggestions for further study.Through the analysis in this thesis, Relevance Theory shows its strong explanatory to metaphors in English commercial advertisements. And with the deep understanding of the English advertisements, it makes contribution to improve the competitiveness of Chinese commercial advertisements manufactures. At the same time, to the readers of advertisements, this study has its practical value to make readers to obtain the intentions that advertisements would like to deliver.