Pictorial Metaphor in Advertisements

Abstract

Metaphor has been first and foremost studied in its verbal variants. As Lakoff and Johnson (1980) claimed, however, "metaphor is primarily a matter of thought and only derivatively a matter of language" (p. 153). Presuming this idea to be correct, this article makes an exploratory contribution to the study of a different type of metaphor, namely, pictorial metaphor. With reference to Black's (1962, 1979) interaction theory, several pictorial metaphors in advertisements are considered with the following questions in mind: What are the two terms of the metaphor and how do we know? Which of the two terms is the ("literal") A-term and which is the ("figurative") B-term? And what can be said about the transfer of properties from B to A? Contextual factors of various kinds help to answer these questions. A tentative subdivision is made into metaphors with one pictorially present term and metaphors with two pictorially present terms.