广告语言中指称模糊的认知语用解读——以汽车广告为例

A Cognitive Pragmatic Approach to Referential Ambiguity in Advertisements:A Case Study of Car Ads

本文以汽车广告为语料,从认知语用视角研究广告语言中的指称模糊现象。在借鉴概念整合理论与关联理论的基础上,笔者建构了交际情境下话语理解的认知语用框架。基于上述框架,研究发现,广告受众理解模糊指称时根据明示刺激、即时语境和认知模型,构建两个输入空间"人"、"车"空间,并依据明示-推理交际模式向合成空间:"人-车"空间映射,从而传递一系列弱暗含,获得广告商试图传递的诗意效果,而这些效果有助于说服广告受众购买该款汽车。语料分析表明,汽车广告商根据不同车型、不同受众和不同需求凸显不同的特点,产生不同的诗意效果。可见,本文建构的交际情境下话语理解的认知语用框架具有较充分的解释力,同时也表明概念整合理论和关联理论融合的可操作性和兼容性。

This study adopts a pragma-cognitive approach to referential ambiguity as found in car advertisements.Drawing on Blending Theory(BT)and Relevance Theory(RT),we establish a pragma-cognitive analytical framework for utterance interpretation in communicative context.Within the framework,we depict the procedure of advertisement interpretation as follows:first,the audience of the advertisements construct two input spaces,namely'car'space and'person/car-owner'space,based on the ostensive stimulus(i.e.the language of the advertisements),the immediate context,and related cognitive models stored in longterm memory;then,they will map the content in the input spaces onto the blended space,namely'personcar'space;as a result,they finally acquire a set of weak implicatures and poetic effects intended by the advertisers to help to achieve their communicative goal,that is,to persuade the audience to buy a particular brand of car.We also find that car advertisers choose to emphasize different features depending on the car type,and the identity and need of the potential customers in order to achieve different poetic effects.The study indicates the explanatory power of the pragma-cognitive framework we build for the interpretation of utterances in context and supports the adequate operability and compatibility of integrating RT and BT.