【正文】 ctors 21 Individual difference in metaphor understanding 227. Conclusion 23Reference 24IntroductionIn the modern world, advertising can be seen everywhere. As a main method of promoting products or services, advertisement plays a more and more important role in mercial world. It highlights the effect of the products and services on the consumers. Metaphor, a traditional topic for poetry and literary studies, has recently attracted the increasing attention of philosophers, linguists, psychologists, and is generally regarded as a testing ground for theories of language prehension. Metaphor has exploded as a topic of interest in the humanities and social sciences over the past twentyfive years (see Cameron, 1999:21) China has also attached great importance to metaphor, which is evidenced the proliferation of publications of papers concerning metaphor studies in China’s major journals of foreign language research.Advertising and metaphor, both are hot issues in the world. Metaphor as an important rhetoric is widely applied to advertisement. Even in the textbooks and tests, there is nothing new in it. There is a mon viewpoint exists among English readers in China, it is easy to grasp English by remember sufficient vocabulary. Only a few readers can pay enough attention to rhetoric, especially metaphor. Therefore, it is possible miss the point when readers have encountered some simply metaphor sentences. In order to offering a good opportunity for English readers have a better understanding about metaphor, the following introduce different ways of classifying metaphor to see how metaphor is understood from different perspectives.2. Metaphor StudiesIt is believed that metaphor is one of the plicated topics in the domain of language and though. Studying and applying metaphor are enormous, there are actually too many different theories of metaphor for any one who wishes to approach metaphor. The Development of MetaphorIn ancient Greece, Aristotle defines metaphor as “the application of an alien name by transference either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or by analogy, that is proportion” (see Butcher, 1948:28.). This account of metaphor is known as the parison theory of metaphor. In the 1980s, George Lakoff, a linguist, and Mark Johnson, a philosopher, suggest that metaphors not only make our thoughts more vivid and interesting but that they actually structure our perceptions and understanding. (1999:54) This is what we called conceptual metaphor theory.Contemporary metaphor researchers differ greatly in their perspectives of metaphor studies. Some of them are interested in the theoretical explorations of metaphor, focusing on such issues as metaphor identification, categorization of metaphor types, and interpretation of metaphor in discourse. Other researchers are inclined to investigate the processes of metaphor production and structuring of conceptual domains through metaphor.These scholars contribute to metaphor studies from different perspectives, at different levels, we can study in a welldeveloped framework or model. The Definition of Metaphor “Metaphor” originated from the Greek “metaphorn”, means “a transfer of a meaning”. According to Webster’s New World Dictionary, “it is a figure of speech containing an implied parison, in which a word or phrase ordinarily and primarily used of one thing is applied to another”. Britannica Book of English Usage defined it “perhaps the most important figure of speech, points out resemblance but with no acknowledge word”(see呂煦, 2004:36 ). Metaphor is language that directly pares seemingly unrelated subjects. In the simplest case, this takes the form: The first subject is a second subject More generally, a metaphor is a rhetorical trope that describes a first subject as being or equal to a second subject in some way. Thus, the first subject can be economically described because implicit and explicit attributes from the second subject are used to enhance the description of the first. This device is known for usage in literature, especially in poetry, where with few words, emotions and associations from one context are associated with objects and entities in a different context. (Net, 1)But metaphor is much than simple A is like B or B is a statement. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) hold a viewpoint that synecdoche, irony and personification are general category that covers a very wide range of metaphors. “Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action”. (1980:4) Aristotle points out that a metaphor is “l(fā)ucid, pleasing, and strange, and has all these qualities to a high degree” (see Cameron, 1999:3) Metaphor is frequently used in the world. However, a large part of metaphor studies has chiefly been focused on theoryintroduction and ments, few studies are focused on the advertising field, both theoretically and experimentally. There are actually some relationship between metaphor and advertising. The aim of this thesis is to find how metaphor applied to advertising English.3. English Advertisement With the economic globalization as well as China entering WTO, more and more foreign products are imported to China, English advertisement has bee more and more popular. Definition of advertising Advertising is a type of publicity to draw public attention to something, for its Latin origin “advertere” means “to turn toward.” or drawing attention to something”(Hermeren L, 1999:2) The following are some of the oftencited definitions of advertising. The famous American Marketing Association defines advertising as follow: Advertising is the nonpersonal munication of usually paid for and usually paid for and usually persuasive in nature about products, services or ideas by identified sponsors through the various media. (1998) Advertising is often regarded as a process of relatively indirect persuasion, based on in