International Journal of Language & Literature

Metaphorical Thoughts in the Cognitive Domain of Cosmetics Advertising
Cao Shuo1, Zhao Xuanyi

Abstract
The employment of advertisements is a contributing factor to the rapid development of economical business, and therefore, scholars pay attention to how to design a successful advertisement. Identifying metaphors applied in advertising can make it more persuasive and attractive. In addition, merchants need to take corresponding countermeasures to deal with the saturation of business market, so that they prefer metaphors in the promotion of products to help consumers better understand unfamiliar concepts. This article mainly studies metaphorical thoughts in business advertising. It selects Artistry cosmetics as the specific research object, uses conceptual metaphors, relevance theory and multimodal metaphors to analyze the formation process, with an attempt to explain how business advertisement conveys its advertising intention through different types of metaphors and how consumers can recognize unfamiliar concepts. The results show that the working mechanism of the three types of conceptual metaphors is the same despite of different frequency of occurrence in advertising texts, and conceptual metaphors facilitate the comprehension of abstract concepts and attributes of advertisements. The findings enable designers and manufacturers to be informed of what kind of metaphor facilitate the cognitive processing of metaphors in cosmetics advertising.

Full Text: PDF      DOI: 10.15640/ijll.v8n1a8