Pictorial-verbal Metaphors in Advertisement

Background and Aim Today, advertising plays an important role in human life and many aspects of the societies' activities. Among different ways of advertising, billboard advertising is of high importance and interest. Billboard advertising makes extensive use of pictorial-verbal metaphors that are considered as a subcategory of multimodal metaphors. Multimodal metaphors are those whose source and target are each represented exclusively or predominantly in different modes. In pictorial-verbal metaphor, there is an association between a verbal with a non-verbal metaphor in a picture. Methods A corpus of ۲۰ billboard advertising collected from various places of Tehran were analyzed from the perspective of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff ۱۹۹۳; Lakoff and Johnson ۱۹۸۰, ۱۹۹۹) and Multimodal Metaphor Theory (۱۹۹۶, ۲۰۰۹, ۲۰۱۴, ۲۰۱۶). For each pictorial-verbal metaphor, the source and target domains were identified and the metaphorical mapping between them was analyzed. Results: Based on work by Forceville (۱۹۹۶, ۲۰۰۹, ۲۰۱۴, ۲۰۱۶) and his Multimodal Metaphor theory, this research investigated pictorial-verbal metaphors in a sample of billboard advertising to see how verbal and pictorial metaphors serve persuasive effects. Conclusion: Results showed that the multimodal metaphors found in billboard advertising are predominantly pictorial-verbal ones because their source and target domains are basically rendered in both pictorial and verbal modes. In the advertisements that we have collected for this study three major types of metaphor based on their mode configuration patterns are observed: (۱) PVMs (pictorial-verbal metaphors), in which the source is represented in pictorial mode and the target verbal; (۲) PPMs (pictorial-pictorial metaphors) in which both the source and the target are rendered in pictorial mode; (۳) POMs (pictorial- metaphors, where Ø here stands for the absence of the target) in which the source is represented in pictorial mode and the target is absent.

Keywords:

pictorial metaphor , multimodal metaphor , multimodal metaphor theory , conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) , cognitive semantics