Metaphor and Metonymy Are Used In Advertising Essay Example

allowing reference to be made straight from the signifier of one entity to the signified of another.

Distinctions between symbol, metaphor and metonymy are often hard to make, and the three are not equally exclusive, for a symbol may initially have been motivated by a metaphorical or metonymic relationship which has since weakened.In advertising the predicament is compounded by the fact that signifiers may be either verbal or symbolic and the two modes constantly cross-refer. The fire in the gas ad, for example, represented by the pictures, is not simply a symbol and a metonym of home, but also a metaphor of the girl's temper, articulated both pictorially and verbally as a pun. An advertiser's aim is often to make the product into a sign of something positive. Tropes or figures of speech, that are words or expressions used in a metaphorical sense, are widely employed in advertising.Amongst tropes, metaphor is normally 'thought of as the fundamental “figure” of speech' (Hawkes 1984:2).

Much work could be done within a Relevance framework on other tropes encountered in advertising, such as irony, hyperbole, meiosis, simile, metonymy, and synecdoche. As Ortony (1979:5) has observed, there is little conformity as to what constitutes metaphors and types of metaphor. Davidson (1979) states that metaphors grounds the audience to see things in a new light, but that to see somewhat in a new light is the work of imagination. This leaves the explanation as indistinct as the metaphors for which he is trying to account.According to the Collins English Language Dictionary (1987:910), a metaphor is 'an ingenious way of describing something, by referring to something else which has the qualities that

you are trying to express'. Thus a shy and fearful person might be called a mouse.

But this particular metaphor is extremely 'standardised' (Sperber and Wilson 1986a:236), that is, so usually used that it is questionable whether it is an 'imaginative' description of such a person. At the other end of the scale are 'creative metaphors' (Sperber and Wilson 1986a:236), which suggest an unusual or unexpected correspondence between words or expressions.Metaphors have usually been taken to be a form of non-literal utterance, but the psychological realism of the distinction between literal and non-literal utterances has been questioned by Rumelhart (1979). He argues that in language acquisition the comprehension process of metaphor is fundamentally the same as that of literal utterances. This suggests that literal and non-literal language use might involve the same comprehension process. Lakoff and Johnson (1980:3) follow the same line in their argument that the human thinking process is 'fundamentally metaphorical in nature'.

They argue against the assumption that metaphors are a divergence from some arbitrarily defined 'normal' speech. Metaphor for them is not only 'a matter of…ordinary language', but also 'a matter of…thought and action'. They distinguish between three kinds of metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980:14, 25). 'Structural metaphors' occur when one concept is 'metaphorically structured' on the basis of another.

While a metaphorical concept 'organises', rather than 'structures' a whole system of concepts, they demote to it as an 'orientational metaphor'.Ontological metaphors' occur when human experience of physical objects and substances gives a basis for understanding abstract things, such as activities, emotions and ideas, of which we lean not to have direct knowledge. This permits us to relate more directly to them.

The fundamental assumption behind Lakoff and Johnson's thinking is that the language we use in everyday life, with metaphor, is evidence of how we understand and experience things. They claim (1980:4) that our common conceptual system is essentially metaphorical, and that it is metaphors which structure our means of perceiving, thinking and acting.

This kind of framework or 'conceptual system' depends on the way we interrelate with our physical and cultural environments. Several of these conceptual systems will be universal, while others will be reliant on language and culture. However, it is clear that Lakoff and Johnson are referring to metaphor not just as a linguistic device, but also as a cognitive object. To pronounce that there is some interaction between the metaphors we use in the particular natural language and the concepts we utilize in perceiving and thinking is one thing; to say that they are identical is another, which is far harder to accept.The assertion that the linguistic representation in a specific language is identical to the cognitive representation employed by the people of that linguistic community needs further evidence.

Wilson and Sperber (1988b:139) refute the requirement for any maxim of truthfulness, and argue that there is no discontinuity between metaphorical and non-metaphorical utterances. They say that 'every utterance comes with an undertaking of faithfulness, not of truth'. In their view, every utterance is a faithful depiction of a thought, but it is not inevitably identical with that thought.Thus a metaphorical utterance faithfully resembles a thought which the speaker aims to communicate. Sperber and Wilson (1986a:264) explain the indeterminacy and the affluence of metaphor by treating it as a variety of 'loose talk'.

They

treat metaphorical utterances as reflecting a diverse degree in the scale of 'resemblance' between the utterance used and the thought communicated. This applies to all cases of utterance interpretation, thus permitting them to account for metaphors and other less than literal utterances without abandoning truth-conditional semantics.The notion of interpretive resemblance is crucial to their account. There is interpretive resemblance between a given utterance and the thought expressed by that utterance, if they resemble each other in partaking of each other's content. Literalness is merely an extreme case in the scale of resemblance.

Metaphors are the consequence of choosing an utterance which is a less than literal interpretation of the speaker's thought. The intention expressed by the utterance shares some of the analytic and contextual implications of the thought which it resembles.There is no obvious definition as to which relative effects are shared between metaphors and the thoughts which they resemble, as metaphors often communicate an indeterminate range of thoughts. That is, the speaker aims to communicate a range of implicatures, rather than a fixed set. Communication succeeds when the hearer has recovered some of the implicatures within the range.

The significance of a metaphor to the hearer is established by recovering an array of implicatures. It is not hard to see why metaphors might be attractive to advertisers.By producing a metaphorical utterance, the advertiser attracts his audience to process the utterance. In so doing, the audience is made to see resemblances between the promoted product or service and the object or property featured in the metaphor. Furthermore, the audience takes part of the accountability in deriving further assumptions about the object which it associates with

the product or service.

Metaphors thus play a significant role in the language of advertising in both Britain and Japan, and, unlike puns, they seem to enjoy a type of respectability.Metaphors used in advertising are often 'conventional' or 'dead' metaphors. The selection of topics apparently leaves aside many other devices in the language of advertising, but nevertheless covers a wide variety of theoretical and analytical problems. Metonymy is paradigms of topic which would rationalize further exploration (Myers 1994).

Despite the low respect which advertising is usually accorded in the intellectual world, the language of advertising gives a stimulating approach to understanding the human mind.Advertising, for all its crass and mercenary qualities, attracts highly qualified people, and advertisers need to keep constantly in touch with rapidly changing social realities. Advertisements give gruffly focused and highly topical insights into the way in which communication works. Moreover, advertising is a mainly good medium for assessing the force of language, given the fixation of advertisers with overcoming the social barriers between themselves and their audience.