Multimodal Metaphor and Metonymy in Advertising: A Corpus-Based Account

TLDR

The study presents the first large-scale analysis of a multimodal corpus of 210 advertisements. The authors describe the corpus composition, analyze how mode and marketing strategy influence conceptual complexity, and qualitatively examine three novel metaphor–metonymy interactions. Metaphtonymy is the most frequent conceptual operation, mode use significantly affects conceptual complexity, while product type and marketing strategy do not influence the number or complexity of conceptual mappings.

Abstract

This article 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 analyzed. 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 frequet 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.