Pictorial Metaphors in Food and Beverages Advertising Discourse

The conceptual metaphors in the advertisements usually are found in the verbal texts yet, “metaphor can occur in pictures, more specifically in printed advertisements and billboards” [2, p1] and usually these pictorial metaphors are more interesting and eye catching than the verbal ones. Thus, this article aims to focus on finding the pictorial metaphors by analyzing both the primary and secondary subjects shown in the pictorial metaphors, through the use of Forceville’s [2, 3] theory on pictorial metaphor in advertising Lakoff and Johnson’s [4], and Kövecses’ [5] theories on metaphor. Although the discussion focuses on the pictorial metaphors, the verbal texts which are used as the context to uncover the pictorial metaphors will certainly be discussed as well. The study is a qualitative and descriptive one, the source of data were from various online magazines, while the data were advertisements on foods and beverages that contained pictorial metaphors. Hopefully the findings would be useful for other researchers in linguistic field, specifically on metaphors.