Visualizing Conceptual Metaphors in Print Wine Advertising

The study is aimed at discovering the principles and means of visualizing conceptual metaphors in print wine advertising. Using the toolkit of multimodal analysis and conceptual metaphor theory, the authors describe primary metaphors involved in the production of visual metaphor in multimodal advertising discourse. In accordance with Charles Forceville’s classification of pictorial metaphors, the authors separate their metaphor types into hybrid metaphors, contextual metaphors, metaphoric similes, and integrated metaphors. For the analysis of image composition and structure, a social semiotics approach (Gunther Kress, Theo van Leeuwen) is used, particularly the informational value of image zones (left and right, up and down, center and periphery), salience (foregrounding, size, contrast, sharpness), and framing. The authors studied 38 images of print wine advertisements which contain visual metaphor in order to discover primary metaphors (Joseph Grady) as a means of visualizing the conceptual metaphor and creating a structure in print wine ads. The authors discover three principal ways of visualizing wine properties using metaphor: food and wine combinations, describing wine by ascribing human properties to it (resulting in pictorial anthropomorphic metaphor), and visualizing the synesthetic metaphor, typical of wine discourse in general. The conceptual metaphor ‘wine is human’ describes such wine properties as slender body, length and number of legs, stages of aging, elegance, pomposity, color, passion, enigmatic character, and nobility. A female image is used almost exclusively to map these properties visually. In images used to advertise the compatibility of wine with certain kinds of food, the viewer always finds an animal image, which metonymically stands for the meat of the animal. The part for whole conceptual metonymy is frequent in all advertisements, especially those that imply animal meat. The visualization of synesthetic metaphors, traditionally found in professional discourse of wine tasters and vendors, maps the taste and aroma of fruit, berries and flowers onto the taste and aroma of wine. The results of multimodal analysis reveal that the majority of pictorial metaphors in wine ads are to be considered monomodal (both source and target domains are in the same modality). The verbal component in some of the ads is not strictly necessary. However, it serves to direct the interpretation of the image towards a metaphorical reading related to wine and its properties. The following primary metaphors were found to lie at the basis of visual metaphorical mappings: important is central, importance is size/volume, essential is internal, interrelatedness is physical interconnectedness, the nature of entity is its shape, similarity is proximity, constituents are contents, perceptible is out. The resulting list adds to the lists of primary metaphors that underlie visual metaphors and composition created by Maria J. Ortiz, Charles Forceville, and other researchers, and serves as an additional proof of primary metaphor functioning in visual production and perception.

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