A Study On Metaphors In English Commercial Advertisement From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

With human being's increasing progress and breakthroughs in the fields of knowledge,economy,technology,etc.,economic globalization is growing fast and connectivity between countries is more frequent.Advertisement,especially commercial advertisement,as one of the colorful elements,plays increasingly vital roles,such as in transmitting human civilization,exchanging products information and guiding consumers.Hence,how to make the advertisement stand out in various commercial advertisements to attract the addressee's attention,and stimulate his purchase desire and finally bring purchase action is the key to success for the advertising designers.In 1980,Lakoff & Johnson published a book named Metaphors We Live by,which marked that the study on metaphors broke through traditional bounds of rhetoric to the cognitive field.And then,metaphor is regarded as a way of thinking as well as a cognitive device.As a useful instrument of designing commercial advertisements,metaphors succeed in attracting addressee's attentions with its unique charm of the language and tactfully conveying richer commercial intentions with less smart words and more vivid pictures.Therefore,commercial advertisements will more effective to reach the communicative goals.Within the framework of relevance theory advanced by Sperber & Wilson,this thesis attempts to study metaphors in English commercial advertisement,believing that communication in advertisements is virtually a cognitive process,in which the advertiser transmits informative intention by ostension,and the addressee interprets the advertiser's communicative intention by inference.As an ostensive stimulus,metaphor in an advertisement is used to lure the addressee to pay more attention to the informative intention of the advertiser,and then the addressee begins to search for optimal relevance by a series of pragmatic inference according to logical information,encyclopedic information and lexical information and eventually achieves communicative intention.In one aspect,the thesis will discuss the pragmatic functions of metaphors in English commercial advertisement in ostensive-inferential communication and in achieving optimal relevance which are both two importantnotions of relevance theory;in another aspect,the thesis points out that metaphors can be classified into verbal metaphor and pictorial metaphor and tries to interpret how this kind of metaphorical expression in English commercial advertisement is used in real life by means of qualitative research methodology,aimed at answering two questions:(i)what important functions do metaphors perform in English commercial advertisements?(ii)what is the process of metaphor comprehension to lead the addressee to optimal relevance?Therefore,this thesis includes an introduction,main body,and conclusion below:The first part is an introduction.With the significant breakthroughs of human communication in the cognitive field,a great research boom about the application of relevance theory and metaphor in real life is witnessed.Hence,firstly,the thesis will focus on the domestic as well as overseas developmental background and research status of this topic.Meanwhile,originality of this thesis is presented,too.As the main body,the second part includes three chapters.Chapter one is literature review which can be divided into three sections.The previous studies and different classifications of metaphors and the motivation of relevance theory for metaphor are elaborated in the first section.Next,advertising features including the nature,the language and the functions of English commercial advertisement are also illuminated in the second section.The third section is about the proposal and development of relevance theory.And this thesis makes a detailed introduction to some major notions of relevance theory,including a choice of context,ostensive-inferential communication,optimal relevance and so forth.All this lays a solid fundamental for the analysis of metaphors in the following chapters.In chapter two,this study collects 23 pieces of advertisements from the Internet,the Economist,Time,Fortune and interprets the functions of metaphors in these commercial advertisements.For the advertiser,advertising communication is a process of ostension,in which informative intention is conveyed.However,for the addressee,advertising communication is a process of inference,in which communicative intention the advertiser is eager to convey is achieved.Hence,as an ostensive stimulus,the metaphor not only attracts the addressee's attentions but also makes the informative intention conveyed richer and communicative intentionobtained more profound.In search of optimal relevance,as a loose talk,the metaphor is relevant enough to be worth the addressee's efforts to process it and the achieved contextual effects are rich enough to offset the extra processing efforts.Consequently,a deeper impression is left,a goodwill is established and the persuasion is more powerful to encourage the addressee to take actions.As a device leading to weak implicature,metaphor pushes the addressee to take a large proportion of responsibilities for the trust and interpretation of advertisements,thus avoiding unnecessary negative effects for the advertiser.In chapter three,this thesis tries to make a qualitative analysis of verbal and pictorial metaphors.Truly understanding metaphor consists of three steps:(i)recognition of metaphor;(ii)construction of contextual assumptions;(iii)recovery of implicatures.As an ostensive stimulus,the metaphor must be relevant to the advertised products or services enough to be worth the addressee's efforts to process it.Hence,a wide range of implicatures,especially weak implicatures based on strong implicatures are derived,richer contextual effects are yielded,optimal relevance is obtained,and eventually,the addressee successfully recognizes the communicative intention.The third part is aimed at concluding the whole thesis.The thesis gives reasonable solutions to research questions in the abstract.Lastly,some limitations of this study pieces of advice for further study are presented.Furthermore,it is emphasized that this thesis is very helpful.For advertisers,they can use metaphors properly to design more novel advertisements,thus making more profits.For addressees,they can understand metaphors in advertisements better,thus learning whether the promoted products or services can meet their needs.