What if Nature Fought Back? Multimodal Metaphor in Green Non-Profit/Social Advertising

Abstract

Creating a conscious environment culture which highlights our commitment to protecting natural resources has been steadily increasing. The use of multimodal metaphor is a crucial rhetorical device for understanding the complexities of the global climate change crisis. More specifically the exploitation of multimodal metaphor in genres such as public awareness campaigns aims at triggering the audience’s attention. In light of this, this paper investigates the use of multimodal metaphor in green non-profit/social advertising to understand to what extent these advertisements may be effective when promoting and encouraging change in behaviour patterns concerning environmental protection and climate change. For this purpose, a corpus of 130 multimodal advertisements containing metaphors on environmental awareness has been investigated. The study uses an adaptation of previous procedures designed for the identification of verbal, visual and multimodal metaphor (Alousque, 2014; Hidalgo-Downing & O’Dowd, 2023; Pragglejaz, 2007; Šorm & Steen, 2018; Steen et al., 2010). Results confirm the effectiveness of metaphorically conceptualising environmental themes such as climate change, global warming, and pollution. Moreover, the findings show that the pragmatic effect of metaphor used by non-profit organisations aims at creating a conscious environment culture, while the majority of the metaphors suggest a mixed or negative evaluation of environmental issues. Further research will include the investigation of metonymy in these campaigns.