Analysing metaphors in commercial advertising

Abstract

According to the Cognitive Linguistic view, a metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) is defined as a tool which allows us to understand one conceptual domain in terms of another. At first, it was thought that metaphors could only occur verbally, but later, new thoughts about the concept of metaphor appeared and more research about other kind of metaphors was developed. For instance, a lot of research dealing with monomodal and multimodal metaphors was carried out. Monomodality presents the target and the source domains of a metaphor in the same mode; in the same way, multimodality presents the target and the source domains of a metaphor in different modes. Metaphors are very common in commercial advertising because they appear to be very effective. Therefore, the aim of this article is to present an analysis of metaphors in commercial advertising. The goal is to present a possible continuum between monomodal and multimodal images through a cognitive analysis, which is expected to show some borderline cases between monomodal and multimodal metaphors. In order to do this, the use of the metonymy is needed in some cases, since metaphor and metonymy are sometimes strongly linked. However, as the number of images analysed is small, a more exhaustive research would be required to reinforce the existence of this continuum.