The Visual Representation of Metaphor: A Systemic Functional Approach (original) (raw)

The Multimodal Construction of Metaphor: A Systemic Functional Approach

Complementing cognitive theories which attribute the understanding of visual metaphors to situational and cultural context, this study adopts a social semiotic perspective to investigate how visual images themselves are constructed to cue conceptual metaphors. The visual realization of metaphor in representational, interactive and compositional meaning structures are modeled based on Kress and van visual grammar. In the representational structure, colligational anomaly is used to explain novel visual metaphors.

Appreciation and interpretation of visual metaphors in advertising across three european countries.

The alternative typologies of visual metaphors proposed by and show some striking similarities with regard to disposition of the visual elements, that is, the source and target domains. The first part of this chapter summarizes the results of two experiments that tested the validity of these classifications with Spanish, French, and Dutch participants and proposes an overall image of the appreciation of the three visual metaphor types. The second part focuses on the interpretations of the metaphors by the Spanish, French, and Dutch participants in the second experiment, to verify whether culture influences the interpretation of the common ground in visual metaphor. We detected subtle cultural differences in focus and interpretive diversity.

Visual Metaphors in Language of Advertising

Everybody more or less is familiar with the term metaphor. According to Berger (2012) metaphor is a form of analogy. He defined it as a mode of communication in which meaning is generated by making comparisons.Visual metaphors are basically highly structured images that stimulate the viewers to understand one concept in terms of another concept. These images are commonly used in several fields in communication, in advertising, in social campaign, in political cartoons and so on.This was first extensively explored by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their work Metaphors We Live By.

The Role of Visual Metaphor in Visual Genres

Professional and Academic Discourse: an Interdisciplinary Perspective. Vol. 2, pp. 119-126.

In the last decades metaphor has been a paramount research topic within the Cognitive Metaphor Theory. Although initially linguistic metaphor received most attention, in recent years the research focus has shifted from verbal metaphor to other types of monomodal and multimodal metaphor (Forceville 2009). One research line has been the study of visual metaphor, i.e. metaphor instantiated through image, in specialised language, including political cartooning (e.g. El Refaie 2003), winespeak (e.g. Caballero 2009) and advertising (Forceville 2008). In the present article I examine the evaluative role of visual metaphor in two visual genres – advertising and political cartooning – through a corpus of English, French and Spanish ads and cartoons. It will be argued that while in advertising metaphor enhances the product qualities or presents it as a necessity, thus working as a persuasive tool, in cartooning metaphor shows the author’s critical stance towards a news event.

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.

Visual and multimodal metaphor in advertising: cultural perspectives

Styles of Communication, 2017

It is often claimed that a picture tells us more than a thousand words, but studying pictorial metaphors reveals how much background knowledge is needed to make sense of, and evaluate, visuals. Commercial print advertising and billboards make for good case studies, because their goal is unambiguous: to sell consumer products and services. In this chapter, some pitfalls of analysing visual and multimodal metaphors are discussed, and considerations of a number of examples suggest how visual metaphors may misfire when they are interpreted by members from another culture than the one for which they were designed. In the conclusion, some ideas are promoted to make the insights productive in educational contexts.