Situated-‘instant’ metaphors: Creativity in Spanish 15M slogans

This paper studies the metaphorical expressions created as slogans by the Spanish protesters who gathered spontaneously in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol Square on May 15th 2011 to demand economic equality and democracy. The metaphors analysed are situated and context-induced, as well as ‘instant’, as they were produced in a very short, concrete period of time; in a specific physical location — the Puerta del Sol Square, Madrid; and within an equally specific socio-cultural situation — a political and economic crisis. In addition, the metaphors were created within a more general Spanish socio-cultural context, clearly shown in the slogans. The analysis reveals a variety of linguistic and multimodal mechanisms that interact with contextual factors resulting in a series of creative multimodal metaphors. This creativity actually fulfils a number of significant discourse-pragmatic functions, from attracting attention to etching in memory, but most of all, they are conceived as powerful rhetorical tools that help others to perceive reality in a new perspective and try to persuade people to join the movement and influence politicians and decision makers.