Multi-modal metaphor is a new perspective in metaphor research developed in modern times. Beyond the metaphor research of language, it combines text, image, sound, and other modes and provides new insights and perspectives for metaphor research. Food advertisements often combine sound, images, and other forms to promote the products and increase consumers’ desire to buy, and they often contain metaphors of multiple modes. However, under the perspective of cross-cultural research, when the same food brand is advertised in different countries, the (...) multi-modal metaphors are varied to appeal to different audiences. This article compares food advertisements in China and in the U.S. from the perspective of multi-modal metaphors, and analyzes the varied applications arising from different cultural influences. The research may act as a reference for advertising strategies on cross-cultural occasions. (shrink)

Concern for global warming, climate change and pollution has grown in recent years, with countries across the world facing natural disasters on unprecedented scales. The communication of environmental protection is therefore a necessary area of enquiry, especially from a Conceptual Metaphor Theory perspective. The present article explores (1) how the themes of global warming, climate change, pollution and activism are conceptualized in a corpus of 51 noncommercial advertisements, (2) the interaction of metonymy with metaphor, (3) the distribution across verbal and (...) visual modes of metaphoric source and target domains, and (4) how value is evoked. Findings show that half of the corpus frames environmental themes through source domains such as weapons, predators and natural disasters. The other half triggers incongruous mappings, such as between concrete entities, and relies on metonymic processes of inference to access the main rhetorical message. Among the most frequent metonymies, CAUSE-EFFECT and CATEGORY FOR SALIENT PROPERTY highlight the negative effects of the represented phenomena. Multimodality usually occurs within source and/or target domains rather than across the metaphoric mapping. Most of the campaigns project mixed value, where a negative evaluation of a theme is accompanied by a positive message, inviting the audience to take action. (shrink)

This study illustrates how metonymy in image and text work together to produce dominant ideologies in US media discourse, through careful, multidisciplinary analysis of over 25 articles in online US newspapers from the years 2004 to 2011 that reported crimes committed by Wall Street/ceos and Latino migrants. Using critical discourse analysis/studies, multimodal analysis, and cognitive linguistic frameworks, we examine examples of metonymy, which combine to negatively ‘Other’ Latinos and produce positive representations of Wall Street/ceos. While work in critical metaphor analysis (...) shows how metaphor plays a crucial role in the depiction of participants and events, we argue that metonymy is equally important and reveals the need for a critical metonymy analysis. These results help to demonstrate the ideological potential of metonymy in media discourse and how it contributes to the public's conceptualisation of these groups, thereby bringing us one step closer to social justice and social change. (shrink)