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The coding and processing in brand names: Metaphors and metonymies in film titles
Author(s)
Date Issued
2017
Citation
Zeng, H. (2017 May 26). The coding and processing in brand names: Metaphors and metonymies in film titles. 62nd Annual Conference of the International Linguistic Association: Language and Brain-coding, understanding, and processing, City University of Hong Kong.
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
This paper examines the coding strategies in brand names from a cognitivepragmatic perspective by analyzing conceptual metaphor and metonymy in
a corpus of 535 film titles of Oscar Best Picture Nominees (1927-2017).
Based on results from quantitative and qualitative analyses, I argue that
film titles are rich in metaphor and metonymy and through the judicious
use of their underlying cognitive operations, metaphor and metonymy are
taken as two powerful naming strategies for film advertising. In
metaphorical titles, cognitive correlation operation can limit negative
inference generations and comparison operation can enhance lexical
richness that helps to film plot conceptualization; in metonymic titles,
domain expansion operation can highlight film plot information and
domain reduction operation can present abundant film contents
economically for film titles’ encoding. The study sheds light on brand
names’ decoding and conceptualization process and also unveils how the
verbal aspect of brand names achieves pragmatic functions in successful
branding.
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