A corpus-based study of visual metaphors in anti-smoking advertisements

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the role of visual metaphors in antismoking advertisements. With this purpose in mind, a corpus of 27 printed advertisements extracted, mainly, from Internet, has been compiled. The study is inspired by Charles Forceville (1996), who provides a complete account on what he has labelled “pictorial metaphor” within the advertising domain. Thus, following his model, two main analyses have been performed. First, the following questions are addressed a) what are the two terms of the metaphor and how do we know?, b)which is the source domain and the target domain of the metaphor and how do we know?, and c) which attributes are mapped from the source domain onto the target domain? Second, once the structure of each metaphor is clarified, the advertisements are classified into four main types, namely: 1) metaphors with one visual element, 2) metaphors with two visual elements, 3) visual similes, and 4) verbo-pictorial metaphors. Results show a significant difference in the number of occurrences of each type. The paper concludes that visual metaphor is a key technique in advertising nowadays and it suggests further research on the designers’ responses to the selected metaphors of this study.