Conceptual Blending Revisited: A Case of Paraphrased Literary Text in Contemporary Advertising

Abstract

One of the successful tools used in creative contemporary advertising is the intentional modification of texts taken from popular literature (Gajewska 2011, also Bralczyk 2004). This paper offers a conceptual blending analysis of an advertisement for Ranigast®, a medicine used in the treatment of dyspepsia, which relies on a paraphrased  fragment of The Sick Kitten, a famous Polish poem for children written by Stanisław Jachowicz. The linguistic analysis of the proposed advertisement will be carried out in the light of conceptual blending theory, in particular with the aid of Line Brandt and Per Aage Brandt’s model of conceptual integration (Brandt and Brandt 2005) Assuming that each advertisement is, to some extent, an interplay between the speaker and the hearer, a particular emphasis is going to be laid upon the complexity of the so-called Semiotic Base Space which serves as a “prerequisite for meaning construction” in the analyzed ad (Brandt and Brandt 2005: 225). For further elaboration of the Semiotic Base Space, which I consider of vital importance for an analyzed instance, Ronald Langacker’s notion of Current Discourse Space (Langacker 1999, 2001) as well as Esther Pascual’s notions of the Verbal Space and Here-and-Now Space (Pascual 2009) will also be taken into account.