Abstract:This study adopts a pragma-cognitive approach to referential ambiguity as found in car advertisements. Drawing on Blending Theory (BT) and Relevance Theory (RT), we establish a pragma-cognitive analytical framework for utterance interpretation in communicative context. Within the framework, we depict the procedure of advertisement interpretation as follows: first, the audience of the advertisements construct two input spaces, namely “car” space and “person/car-owner” space, based on the ostensive stimulus (i.e. the language of the advertisements), the immediate context, and related cognitive models stored in long-term memory; then, they will map the content in the input spaces onto the blended space, namely “person-car” space; as a result, they finally acquire a set of weak implicatures and poetic effects intended by the advertisers to help to achieve their communicative goal, that is, to persuade the audience to buy a particular brand of car. We also find that car advertisers choose to emphasize different features depending on the car type, and the identity and need of the potential customers in order to achieve different poetic effects. The study indicates the explanatory power of the pragma-cognitive framework we build for the interpretation of utterances in context and supports the adequate operability and compatibility of integrating RT and BT.