Visual and Multimodal Metaphor in Advertising: Cultural Perspectives

Abstract

It is often claimed that a picture tells us more than a thousand words, but studying pictorial metaphors reveals how much background knowledge is needed to understand and evaluate visuals. Commercial print advertising and billboards make for good case studies, because their goal is unambiguous: to sell consumer products and services. In this chapter some of the pitfalls in analysing visual and multimodal metaphors are discussed, Consideration of a number of examples suggests how metaphors involving visuals may misfire when they are interpreted by members from another culture than the one for which they were designed. In the conclusion some ideas are put forward to make these insights productive in educational contexts.

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