Analysis of visual metaphors in social media

Abstract

From a Cogntive Linguistics point of view, a metaphor was understood as a tool that allows us to understand one conceptual domain in terms of another (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Originally, metaphors were only considered from a verbal perspective. Later on, a whole new wave of research appeared to show that metaphors could also be explored from a different view. This research gave birth to a new concept called metaphor and modality. This concept's main focus was that in monomodal metaphors, the source and the target domain was exposed in the same mode whereas in multimodal metaphors, the source and the target domain were presented in different modes. Thus, the present paper aims to present a qualitative analysis of pictorial metaphors in social media. The goal of this analysis is to show that social media influences our perception of the world and often manipulates us and makes us captive of their use. In order to do so, I make use of a corpus of 6 pictorial metaphors and offer a comprehensive cognitive analysis of them. These images emphasize the manipulation of social media and techonology in today's society. Nevertheless, because the length of this paper is very limited, a more extended research would be useful to enrich the findings of this study.