Primary metaphors in advertising: An analysis of tangible vs. intangible products printed advertisements
DOI
https://doi.org/10.25267/Pragmalinguistica.2022.i30.15Info
Authors
- Lorena Pérez-Hernández (ES) Universidad de La Rioja https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6500-0157
- David Huguet Varea (ES) Universidad de La Rioja https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1967-2574
Abstract
Primary metaphors are focal points for the present-day global advertising industry (Ortiz, 2010, 2011; Pérez-Hernández, 2013a, 2013b, 2014, 2019; Pérez-Sobrino, 2017). Nevertheless, there is little research on how they operate in relation to the nature of different products/services. This paper aims to provide (1) insights into the pervasiveness and functioning of primary metaphors in printed advertisements; and (2) a thorough analysis on their productivity in relation to the nature (material vs. immaterial) of the target product. The analysis of a corpus of 300 printed ads reveals that primary metaphors largely outnumber resemblance metaphors in the advertisements under scrutiny. It provides a detailed inventory of the source and target domains involved, and a description of the interaction patterns between primary metaphors and the product/service. The analysis of the data unveils a higher frequency of occurrence of primary metaphor mappings in relation to tangible products and elucidates reasons for this attested trend.
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Copyright (c) 2022 Lorena Pérez-Hernández, David Huguet Varea
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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