The role of pictorial metaphor in magazine advertising

Abstract

Most studies on metaphor, in the wake of the work published by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), have mainly focused on its verbal component. Few scholars have attempted to approach the study of metaphor from the perspective of its non-verbal manifestations. Among them, I will mention Forceville (1994, 1996), who has done extensive research into the use of what he has coined “pictorial metaphor” and has provided an interesting account of it in the domain of advertising. In this paper, following the example set by this author, I consider a number of pictorial metaphors with some of the same guiding questions: What is the literal A-term? What is the figurative B-term? And what properties get projected from one onto the other? The concept of situational context (Fairclough, 1989) will play a key role when answering these questions. Finally, presuming that language is “an instrument of control” as claimed by Hodge and Kress (1993), I will try to uncover the persuasion exercised through metaphor (its inference patterns and value judgements) in the discourse of advertising.