Study Of Multimodal Metaphors And Metonymies In TV Commercials From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Since Lakoff and Johnson put forward conceptual metaphors in 1980,cognitive linguists have generally agreed that conceptual metaphors and conceptual metonymies are basic in human thinking.With the rapid development of science and information technology,communication is no longer limited to the medium of language.In recent years,the study of multimodal metaphor and multimodal metonymy has been popular among cognitive linguists and it has opened up the horizon of conceptual metaphor and metonymy research with far-reaching significance.In the field of TV commercials,advertisers employ a lot of multimodal metaphors and metonymies in order to attract and hold the audience’s attention and convey the information and messages of the advertised products to the audience.In 1986,the French scholar Sperber and British scholar Wilson proposed the wellknown relevance theory.Cognitive linguists believe that the relevance theory can be adopted to explain different aspects of human communication.However,up till now,relevance theory has focused primarily on spoken communication between two people.In order to live up to its full potential,relevance theory needs to be adapted and extended in various ways.In the field of advertising,the relevance theory has been employed widely in the study of static print advertisements.Few scholars have done research on the application of relevance theory in analyzing dynamic TV commercials.The author of this article adopts the method of qualitative analysis to identify and analyze the multimodal metaphors and multimodal metonymies in Apple Home Pod TV commercial.The multimodal metaphors and metonymies are divided into different categories.The author has also analyzed the content of the whole commercial from the perspective of relevance theory.After the analysis of the commercial video,the author finds out that the multimodal metaphors in the commercial include the following five categories: UPDOWN,BRIGHTNESS-DARKNESS,FRONT-BACK,FAST-SLOW,and WITH WEIGHTS-WITHOUT WEIGHTS.The multimodal metonymies include the following four categories: CATEGORY-MEMBER,CATEGORY-PROPERTY,EFFECT-CAUSE and ACTION-ATTRIBUTE.Apple is all about customers’ experience.The target domains of the multimodal metaphors and multimodal metonymies constructed in this commercial are related to the protagonist’s emotion in most cases.The audience use the images,sounds,and language in the commercial to infer and interpret the content of the whole commercial.The advertiser engages the commercial audience in additional processing efforts,which demands extra inferencing.It is bound to be offset by a rich set of positive cognitive effects.Thus,the commercial can leave a deeper impression on the commercial audience.