The Role of Metaphor in Advertisement Texts: A Psycholinguistic-Structural Study (original) (raw)

The role of figurative complexity in the comprehension and appreciation of advertisements

To date, research in advertising has focussed almost exclusively on metaphor, with linguists and marketing scholars paying very little attention to alternative types of figurative expression. Beyond the finding that metaphor leads to an increased appreciation of advertisements, there has been surprisingly little research into how consumer response is affected by metonymy, or by metaphor–metonymy interactions. In this article, we present findings from a study that investigated the depth to which participants (n = 90) from a range of cultural and linguistic backgrounds (the UK, Spain, and China) were found to process 30 real-world adverts featuring creative metaphor and metonymy in multimodal format. We focus on the cross-cultural variation in terms of time taken to process, appreciation and perceived effectiveness of adverts, and on individual differences explained by different levels of need for cognition. We found significant variation in the understanding of advertisements containing metaphor, metonymy, and combinations of the two, between subjects and across nationalities in terms of (i) processing time, (ii) overall appeal, and (iii) the way in which participants interpreted the advertisements.

The strategic use of the visual mode in advertising metaphors

In: Emilia Djonov and Sumin Zhao (eds), Critical Multimodal Studies of Popular Culture , 2013

Metaphors present one kind of thing (a “target”) in terms of another (a “source”), and are therefore ideal instruments for advertisers to make claims about products (the metaphors’ targets) efficiently and implicitly. Since the intended interpretation of metaphors is often not spelled out, advertisers often get away with suggesting meanings without taking responsibility for them by making skillful use of the visuals as part of metaphors. This chapter explains how visual and multimodal metaphors in advertising work, and discusses some cases to show how metaphor analysis can be a critical tool in the evaluation of advertising.

The role of text in the identification of visual metaphor in advertising

In the last decades visual metaphor has been considerably researched, particularly in advertising. Several methods have been developed for the identification and analysis of visual metaphor (e.g. Forceville, 1996, Forceville, 2008, Phillips, 2003 and Gkiouzepas and Hogg, 2011). Identifying the metaphorical meaning of the image on the basis of formal and conceptual categories is quite straightforward in these methods. In this paper we provide an insight into the role of text in identifying visual metaphor in ads through the quantitative analysis of a small sample of online ads. Although the image may stand out as a separate unit, the verbal element often helps to determine the metaphoricity of the image. The image-text interaction has been discussed by several scholars such as Barthes (1977) and Kress and van Leeuwen (2006). Whereas Barthes sees the relationship in terms of dependence of the image on the text, Kress and van Leeuwen claim that they are connected but independent. Our study leads us to postulate a metaphoricity scale of the image on the basis of its relationship with the text.

The Impact of Visual Metaphor Complexity in Print Advertisement on the Viewer’s Comprehension and Attitude

Communication and Linguistics Studies

Visual rhetoric is considered a powerful tool of persuasion. It is widely used in political discourse, poetry and advertising language. This study tackles the topic of visual metaphor in print advertisements. It examines visual metaphor complexity on the viewer's comprehension and attitude. It uses Phillips and Mc Quarrie's classification of visual metaphor which offers an accurate classification of the different types of visual rhetoric. It distinguishes two dimensions, namely; visual structure and meaning operation. The former refers to the nature of the relation between the two pictures in comparison while visual structure refers to the way the relevant pictures are placed together. The combinations of the two dimensions result in nine types of visual metaphor which are: Juxtaposition/connection, juxtaposition/similarity, juxtaposition/opposition, fusion/connection, fusion/similarity, fusion/opposition, replacement/connection, replacement/similarity and replacement/opposition. The main findings show that complex and rich visual metaphors are more difficult to understand and are not positively perceived by the viewers. In fact, viewers of visual metaphor enjoy solving incongruity and are willing to devote extra efforts in understanding and processing visual metaphor. However, a complex and rich visual metaphor is not very appealing as their complexity will lead the viewers to opt out from enjoying and processing visual metaphor incongruity.

An Ecolinguistic Analysis of the Use of Metaphor to Enhance the Value of Products in Advertisements

Humanities & Social Sciences Reviews

Purpose of the study: The study investigates metaphors in advertisements from the perspective of ecolinguistics. It focuses on the reasons for which the manufacturers use metaphors for the advertising of their products. It also aims to find the role of metaphor in arising feelings of the consumers towards the products. Methodology: The data have been collected from the official website of four multinational companies named A, B, C, and D. Only thirteen advertisements are analyzed in this research. The selection is made based on the use of metaphor in the advertisements—theory of Conceptual metaphor by Lakoff and Johnson (2008) and Stibbe (2015)’s Model of encolinguistic analysis guided the mode of the present research. Main Findings: It is found that the manufacturers make use of metaphors to grab the attention of the audience towards the product through its sensual appeal. Moreover, the advertising agencies assign some other entity qualities through meta help in the positive eval...

Multimodal metaphor and metonymy in advertising: A corpus-based account. Metaphor & Symbol 31(2): 1-18

2016

This paper offers the first large-scale study of a multimodal corpus of 210 advertisements. First, the reader is presented with a description of the corpus in terms of the distribution of conceptual operations (for the purposes of this work, metaphor and metonymy) and use of modal cues. Subsequently, the weight of mode and marketing strategy to trigger more or less amounts of conceptual complexity is analysed. This corpus-based survey is complemented with the qualitative analysis of three novel metaphor-metonymy interactions that stem from the data and that have not yet been surveyed in multimodal use. The results show that metaphtonymy (a metaphor-metonymy compound) is the most frequent conceptual operation in the corpus; that there is a significant effect of the use of modes in the activation of different amounts of conceptual complexity; and that the type of advertised product and the marketing strategy has no significant effect on the number and complexity of conceptual mappings in the advertisement.

Multimodal Metaphor in Advertisement

AICLL: ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE, 2018

Metaphor based on the cognitive linguistic view can be defined as a tool which allows us to understand one conceptual domain in terms of another. What usually happens is that we use a physical. What we need to comprehend, is the target domain. It means that human cognition is organized in conceptual schema. Rodriguez (2015) stated that multimodal needs a mental comprehension process which differs from processing visual or verbal concepts alone. Metaphor has been used in many advertising. The metaphor can be interpreted differently from one to others. This paper was to present an analysis of visual metaphors, and to illustrate the existence of a possible of multimodal metaphors in advertising. Multimodal needs a mental comprehension process which differs from processing visual or verbal concepts alone. In this case this study only focuses on the analysis of multimodality metaphor which found in some advertisements. In analyzing the multimodal metaphors in commercial advertising, corpus private static adverts from the TV were selected. All of the pictures presented are a verbal part.

Meaning Chasing Kiddies: Children-s Perception of Metaphors Used in Printed Advertisements

World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology, International Journal of Social, Behavioral, Educational, Economic, Business and Industrial Engineering, 2013

Today's children, who are born into a more colorful, more creative, more abstract and more accessible communication environment than their ancestors as a result of dizzying advances in technology, have an interesting capacity to perceive and make sense of the world. Millennium children, who live in an environment where all kinds of efforts by marketing communication are more intensive than ever are, from their early childhood on, subject to all kinds of persuasive messages. As regards advertising communication, it outperforms all the other marketing communication efforts in creating little consumer individuals and, as a result of processing of codes and signs, plays a significant part in building a world of seeing, thinking and understanding for children. Children who are raised with metaphorical expressions such as tales and riddles also meet that fast and effective meaning communication in advertisements. Children's perception of metaphors, which help grasp the "product and its promise" both verbally and visually and facilitate association between them is the subject of this study. Stimulating and activating imagination, metaphors have unique advantages in promoting the product and its promise especially in regard to print advertisements, which have certain limitations. This study deals comparatively with both literal and metaphoric versions of print advertisements belonging to various product groups and attempts to discover to what extent advertisements are liked, recalled, perceived and are persuasive. The sample group of the study, which was conducted in two elementary schools situated in areas that had different socioeconomic features, consisted of children aged 12.