A Multi-directional Study Of Creative Metaphors In Commercial Advertisements

This study aims to study creative metaphors in a specific nonliterary discourse,namely, commercial advertisement. The purpose of the study is to find out where themetaphorical creativity comes from and what functions creative metaphors have incommercial advertisements. All the examples are collected from current magazines,newspapers, TV, billboards, Internet, etc, in order to make sure the authenticity of linguisticdata. In general, creative metaphors in commercial advertisements help to achieve thefollowing functions: persuading indirectly, winning brand preference and loyalty, beingbrief, providing entertainment, building values, avoiding legal dispute, and providinghumor. After the analysis of69examples, the author summed up11approaches of makingcreative metaphors, and they are classified into groups from four perspectives: rhetoricalperspective, cognitive perspective, pragmatic perspective and other perspectives. The11approaches are listed as follows:(1) Combining metaphor with another figure of speech;(2)Transferred epithet;(3) Abstract-to-concrete mapping;(4) Novel mapping;(5)Reliteralization of dead metaphor;(6) Parody of dead metaphor;(7) Elaboratingmetaphorical mapping;(8) Combining two compatible metaphors;(9) Creating newcontext;(10) Multimodal metaphor;(11) Conflict of double images.For each specific creative metaphor, the author analyzes its unique beauties andfunctions. Combining metaphor with another figure of speech can highlight metaphoricity;transferred epithet enriches readers’ sensory experience, the nature of which istransplanting attributes; abstract-to-concrete metaphor is to map abstract senses such asemotions, ideas, values onto the concrete products; brand-new mapping requires creatorsto be resourceful and have good imagination and association ability; reliteralization andparody of dead metaphor can highlight metaphoricity of the dead metaphors; elaborationand combination are based on primary conceptual metaphors, yet they can generatebrand-new metaphorical meanings; new metaphorical meaning comes into being whendead metaphors are applied in brand-new context; multimodal metaphors are open in interpretation; conflict of two co-existing images is the result of anomalous grammaticalcollocation.