Rhetorical Devices In Chinese Cosmetic Ads:a Study From The Perspective Of Construal Theory

As a popular mass media,cosmetic ads have penetrated into every aspect of people’s daily life and influenced people’s consumption behavior.Since advertising language is the core information carrier of ads,its vividness is crucial to the success of an ad.As a result,rhetorical devices,as an important language modifier,are often used in advertising language to enhance the appeal and persuasiveness of ads.Nowadays,with the development of the cosmetic advertising industry,the study of rhetorical devices in advertising language has caught people’s attention.However,most of these studies focus on the fields such as a single rhetorical device,semantics or pragmatics,and there hardly is so far a comprehensive systematic study on rhetorical devices in cosmetic ads from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.In view of that,the author of this thesis attempts to investigate rhetorical devices employed in cosmetic ads from the perspective of cognitive linguistic theory of construal so as to uncover the motivation underlying the application of rhetorical devices in cosmetic ads.According to cognitive grammar theory,construal refers to our ability to conceive and portray the same situation in different ways.Construal,in essence,is a conceptual process that derives from people’s experience of the real world.Different construal operations reflect different human cognitive experiences and cognitive styles.Rhetorical devices are also based on human experience,which is a manifestation of human cognition in language.Therefore,construal theory provides a theoretical basis and cognitive interpretation for the understanding of rhetorical devices in cosmetic ads.The author of this thesis firstly attempts to give the explanation for the feasibility of the combination of the construal theory and rhetorical devices,and then to summarize the main types of rhetorical devices in Chinese cosmetic ads by the advertiser,and finally to use case analysis to explore the explanatory power of construal theory for the interpretation and understanding of rhetorical devices from the four dimensions,further verifying the important role of dimensions of construal in the construction of rhetorical devices in cosmetic ads by advertiser.The basic conclusion of this thesis lies mainly in the following aspects: Firstly,faced with parody or pun in an ad,people tend to associate it with those familiar language materials such as idioms,common sayings,and aphorism,which serve as the background for them to explore the whole meaning of the ad.This type of ad is often the result of the construal dimension of focusing.Secondly,the parallelism or repetition frequently used in cosmetic ads is usually a fine-grained description of products.Of course,the coarse-grained description can also be applied at the beginning of the ad as a guide for the whole ad to pave the way for the following description in a fine-grained way.From this point of view,such types of ads are usually the resultof the construal dimension of specificity.Thirdly,in cosmetic ads,the perspective may be changed from the product to a specific person in order to highlight the effect of the product,which is realized by the use of personification in the ad.The application of such rhetoric device is often the result of the construal dimension of perspective.Lastly,as the most frequently used rhetorical device in cosmetic ads,metaphor or hyperbole,whose tenor or exaggerated part is often vivid and concrete,is usually the target of prominence for advertisers.The ad of this type is usually a result of the dimension of prominence.This study,which is an attempt to apply the construal theory of cognitive linguistics to the field of rhetorical devices in cosmetic ads,reveals that construal theory provides a theoretical framework for the interpretation of rhetorical devices in cosmetic ads,in which different dimensions of construal lay a cognitive basis for the construction and interpretation of rhetorical devices.Thus the study helps to enrich the theory of rhetoric to some extent,and further proves the explanatory power of cognitive linguistics for rhetoric.