Abstract
The objectives of the current study are threefold: a) to investigate what types of metaphors are used in Arab and Western car advertisements and why they use them, b) to explore how metaphors are used in Arab and Western car advertisements, and c) to explore how cultural attributes are used along with metaphors in Arab and Western car advertisements. The study adopted a descriptive approach through content analysis using three models: cultural (Hofstede, 2005), metaphorical (Lankoff & Johnson, 1980), and contrastive discourse analysis (Farclough's, 2001), approaches to analyze the data. The study sample comprised 30 car advertisements from Holland, France, Germany, Italy, the US, and Arab countries, each with five advertisements published online in 2016. The findings of the study show that car advertisements frequently use metaphorical strategies. In addition, the study revealed differences between Arab and Western advertisements in terms of the employment of cultural attributes. Finally, the study also indicated that even within the Western context, there is a different use of metaphorical strategies with subtle differences.
Highlights
Language in both spoken and written forms plays a crucial role in communication and socialization
The current study finds that there is a strong relationship between cultural attributes and metaphor usage, and critical discourse analysis (CDA), advertisements are not taking into account these elements, and their work may lead to failure
The rationale for the selection of car is that: a) car companies invest a massive amount of money in a car advertisement, but there is a report of failure, and the reason is not apparent (Adbrand.com), b) car advertisement is among the top ten culture-bound advertisements (Johnson, 2010) but study in this area is underreported or lacking as highlighted in (DeMooij, 2011; Morris & Waldman, 2011), c) there is a vast online car advertisement in the Arab world, but it is not clear how and what types of metaphors and cultural attributes are used in their advertisements to persuade their audience into purchasing their products
Summary
Language in both spoken and written forms plays a crucial role in communication and socialization. Advertisements, in the cultural context of the target language community, have the roles of communication and social process to affect its audience. One of the persuasive strategies of advertisements is a metaphor, which has a close relationship with the culture of the language (de Mooij & Hofstede, 2011). Metaphor comprises tenor (the main subject) and vehicle (transfer qualities of one idea to another) (Kaplan, 1990). It is argued that metaphors are split into three main categories: structural, ontological, and orientational (Kovecses, 2010). Structural metaphors introduce similarities between concepts and objects: "Ideas are food", as both can be eaten and digested, and "argument is war" as both can be fought. Ontological metaphors refer to concepts in terms of objects, substances, or discrete entities, as in "He broke down. Orientation metaphors use one notion structured in terms of another in spatial orientation: "up is happy, down is sad", and are based on culture, not on random choice
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