Visual metaphor in print and billboard advertisements

What is it about?

In this monograph I adapt Black's (1979) seminal chapter to account for creative visual metaphor, drawing on relevance theory to explain how the interpretation of ads is strongly steered by genre conventions. I propose three subtypes of visual/pictorial metaphor and the verbo-pictorial variety -- which in later work I discuss as a subtype of multimodal metaphor.

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Why is it important?

If we take seriously Lakoff & Johnson's (1980) pioneering insight that metaphors are first and foremost conceptual phenomena, it is crucial to investigate non-verbal and multimodal manifestations of this trope, since "the medium is the message" (Marshall McLuhan)..