A COGNITIVE-PRAGMATIC APPROACH TO METAPHOR AND METONYMY IN BRAND NAMES: A CASE STUDY OF FILM TITLES

Abstract

This paper analyzes the cognitive and pragmatic roles of conceptual metaphors and metonymies in brand names. By investigating a corpus of 535 Oscar film titles, it argues that metaphor and metonymy are two powerful naming strategies for film branding. Abundant evidence reveals that film titles are rich in metaphor and metonymy and relevant cognitive operations are activated to generate the drawing of inferences from the semantic cues provided by metaphorical and metonymic film titles. Specifically, in metaphorical titles, the correlation operation can limit the risk of negative inference generations and the comparison operation can enhance the degree of lexical richness that helps film plot conceptualization; in metonymic titles, the domain expansion operation can highlight film plot information, and the domain reduction operation can present abundant film contents which makes film title more economical. In this way, metaphor and metonym are taken as safe and effective film branding and marketing strategies. The cognitive analysis of film title contributes to studies in brand names, verifies and supplements cognitive-pragmatic theories and also sheds light on cognitive research in advertising discourse.

基於概念隱喻和概念轉喻的視角，采用定量和定性相結合的方法，本文對535部奧斯卡電影片名中的隱喻和轉喻進行辨別，提供了詳細的識別步驟，強調臨時語境構建和認知域界定在兩者識別過程中的關鍵性。研究結果顯示隱喻和轉喻是電影廣告的兩種有效命名策略，隱喻運行的相似性認知機制能賦予電影片名更多新的屬性；相關性機制能提高電影情節的理解力；轉喻的源域擴張機制能凸顯電影情節信息，源域縮小機制能呈現更豐富的電影內容。電影片名的認知分析豐富了專有名詞語類的研究，驗證和補充了認知理論，有助於認知和語用相結合的探索。