Advertising English, as an application language, has gradually evolved into a non-scalable specialized language because of its special utility, so this paper introduces the definition, characteristics and purpose of product advertising, so that people can better understand why advertisers like to use metaphors。 In this paper, metaphor is studied from the perspective of Relevance Theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson。 Through the three principles of Relevance Theory: ostensive-inferential, optimal relevance and cognitive context, the interpretation of metaphor in product advertising appears to be persuasive。 Since those can help to understand English product advertising and to improve the competitive power of Chinese product advertising, at the same time, for audience, it also has the practical value to reveal the intention of product advertising。

2。 Literature Review

As we all know, the study of metaphor has a long history。 Metaphor in people's daily life exists everywhere, which has been an indispensable part of human communication process。 It is "an effective cognitive tool to conceptualize abstract goals", the best way to better understand human cognitive abilities, and to be a very important part of language learning。 Metaphor can create new concept and form new ideas。 And the basic function is to help people to better understand the new things based on something familiar, and then through the ever-changing gradually close to the new concept。 So the concept of metaphor is an indispensable part of culture, which helps people to better understand the objective world。 At the same time, in recent years, Relevance Theory has become the most influential cognitive pragmatics theory in the West, and metaphor itself is mainly a pragmatic concept。 In the framework of relevance theory, the use of metaphor is a reasoning process which refers to the interpretation of the optimal relevance of two concepts related to brain mechanism, and that is a kind of verbal communication behavior。

2。1 Previous studies on metaphor

According to the book Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson classify metaphors into three categories: Structural Metaphors, Orientational Metaphors and Ontological Metaphors。 They are mainly intended to help analyze the formation of metaphorical cognitive rationale。 Firstly, Structural Metaphors refer to the structure of the source domain of metaphor can be systematically transferred to the target domain, so that the latter can be understood systematically by the structure of the former。 It is grounded in systematic correlations within our experience。 Secondly, Orientational Metaphors do not structure one concept in terms of another but instead organize a whole system of concepts with respect to one another。 Since most of them have to do with spatial orientations which arise from the fact that they function as they do in our physical environment。 Then the last category is Ontological Metaphors。 Just as the basic experiences of human spatial orientations give rise to orientational metaphors, so our experiences with physical objects (especially our own bodies) provide the basis for an extraordinarily wide variety of ontological metaphors, that is, ways of viewing events, activities, emotions, ideas,ec。, as entities and substances。 (Lakoff&Johnson 25)文献综述

According to different perspectives, metaphor can be pided into different categories。 Here simply from the macroscopic angle--the social and study development to classify metaphor into two ways: the representative traditional metaphor and modern metaphor。 In the first place, the traditional concept of metaphor has two basic understandings。 Firstly, metaphor is an unusual phenomenon in the use of language, so its study is excluded from the research of language system; and the next is that metaphor is a rhetorical phenomenon, just the ornate decoration of the language。 Aristotle is the first philosopher to study and discuss the phenomenon of metaphor, and thus he is widely regarded as the father of the rhetoric view of western traditional metaphor。 In his view, metaphor is the name belongs to one thing that given to another thing, such transfer or subordination to the species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or by analogy。 This traditional view of metaphor does not specify whether words, things or concepts constitute metaphor, nor does it definite metaphor from linguistic forms or essential features。