Abstract
In today’s industrial society with great affluence in material goods, consumption in our mind no longer aims at objective function, but at the sign-value connoted in the objects. Advertisement is the main carrier of sign-consumption ideology with rich multimodal metaphorical resources. This study follows the analytical mode of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), by analyzing multimodal metaphor in print magazine advertisement from the perspective of Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) to explore the hidden sign-consumption ideology. The main findings of the research are: 1) metaphors in selected ads are all novel metaphors, in which the target domain is always presented by the advertised products while source domain is always presented in form of image; 2) counterpart correspondences mapped between two input spaces are the imposed selling points and sign-value, which take the main marketing functions; 3) relegating and weakening the objective function but advocating sign-value of goods is essentially because of people’s desire for differentiation in homogenized industrial society, which would allow the market more space to conduct secondary exploitation to people instead of labor exploitation. This interdisciplinary study not only adds new content to linguistics but also provides new perspective to consumption issue of sociology and economics. Besides, it provides a rational warning for people to reflect their consumption behavior.In today’s industrial society with great affluence in material goods, consumption in our mind no longer aims at objective function, but at the sign-value connoted in the objects. Advertisement is the main carrier of sign-consumption ideology with rich multimodal metaphorical resources. This study follows the analytical mode of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), by analyzing multimodal metaphor in print magazine advertisement from the perspective of Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) to explore the hidden sign-consumption ideology. The main findings of the research are: 1) metaphors in selected ads are all novel metaphors, in which the target domain is always presented by the advertised products while source domain is always presented in form of image; 2) counterpart correspondences mapped between two input spaces are the imposed selling points and sign-value, which take the main marketing functions; 3) relegating and weakening the objective function but advocating sign-value of goods is essentially because of people’s desire for differentiation in homogenized industrial society, which would allow the market more space to conduct secondary exploitation to people instead of labor exploitation. This interdisciplinary study not only adds new content to linguistics but also provides new perspective to consumption issue of sociology and economics. Besides, it provides a rational warning for people to reflect their consumption behavior.
Highlights
1.1 Rationale of the StudyToday‟s world has stepped into a highly industrialized society which brings the great affluence of material goods to our life
This study, under the research framework of Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA),by finding linguistic resources used in multimodal metaphors, disclosing the cognitive operation mechanism behind multimodal metaphors with the help of conceptual blending theory, tentatively explores the sign-consumption ideology hidden in multimodal metaphors of print magazine advertisements
Through analyzing multimodal metaphor from three dimensions, the hypothesis that there is sign-consumption ideology connoted in ads is verified
Summary
Today‟s world has stepped into a highly industrialized society which brings the great affluence of material goods to our life. There is all around us today a kind of fantastic conspicuousness of consumption and abundance, constituted by the multiplication of objects, services and material goods, and this represents something of a fundamental mutation in the ecology of the human species (Baudrillard, 1970). In illustrating the relationship of people‟s needs and satisfactions to objects, Jean Baudrillard (1970) explains that outside the field of its objective function, where it is irreplaceable, outside the field of its denotation, the object becomes substitutable in a more or less unlimited way within the field of connotations, where it assumes sign-value. In our today‟s society, consumption in our mind no longer aims at the former field, but at the sign-value connoted in objects. Because objects here respond to the social logic or the logic of desire, in which objects are regarded as unconscious and changeable sign system (Baudrillard, 1970)
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