Multimodal metaphors and their use in advertising and political cartoons

a research overview

Abstract

This article provides a research overview of multimodal metaphors, with particular emphasis on their use in political cartoons and advertisements; the integration of both the linguistic and pictorial levels (verbo-pictorial metaphors) is widespread. After a brief outline of conceptual metaphor and its extension through blending theory, the phenomena of visual metaphor will be discussed before addressing the problem area of multimodal metaphor. In this context, the continuum-based definition proves to be useful. Furthermore, selected works from the two central fields of application in focus here, namely multimodal metaphors in political cartoons and in advertising, are discussed by way of example.