Metaphor and the Social World - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2013

This article presents an analysis of public interviews with the American actor Charlie Sheen during a difficult time in his life when he appeared to be speaking and acting crazy. Sheen’s metaphoric descriptions of his life mostly referred to common conventional metaphoric concepts. However, closer examination of the metaphoric discourse revealed that he characterized his life and thoughts using various allegorical themes, most of which relate to fantasy characters, and thought of himself as a special destructive machine. Sheen may possibly have been experiencing the symptoms of certain mental disorders. But we argue that his metaphoric discourse was creative and coherent through his engaging in allegorical thought which is grounded in common embodied simulation processes.

Light and darkness can be used metaphorically to help structure good and bad in all media, but film is particularly suitable for exploiting such metaphors. On the basis of examples from three feature films, we discuss in what way the metaphor functions in general and suggest how it allows for a degree of creative play. Moreover, it is pointed out how the metaphor usually interacts with other narratologically salient elements in order to achieve its specific, context-dependent effects. The paper ends with suggestions how the study of this and other conceptual metaphors in film may benefit both metaphor and film scholarship.

Multimodal metaphor studies has hitherto neglected one key arena in the creative arts: literature. This article explores four case studies of multimodal metaphor within contemporary experimental literature. In poetry, the metaphor EMOTIONS ARE OBJECTS is discussed within Anne Carson’s (2009) accordion ‘poem in a box’, in which the poet struggles with the death of her brother; in literature, Steve Tomasula and Stephen Farrell’s (1996) fold-out fiction TOC and Mark Z. Danielewski’s (2006) novel Only Revolutions, both thematically interested in time and designed to be rotated in reading, are explored to reveal the metaphor TIME IS CIRCULAR MOTION; and in the graphic novel, analysis of Warren Ellis’ (2011) “SVK”, for which readers use a torch to reveal characters’ thoughts printed in UV ink, exposes the metaphor KNOWLEDGE IS LIGHT.Throughout, it is shown that multimodal metaphors are generated through both the interaction of verbal and visual modes, and through a reader-user’s performative engagement with the text. Moreover, early theorisations of multimodal metaphor in which the two domains (source and target) were required to stem from different modalities, are called into question. Rather, the creative affordances of multimodal literature show such metaphors to be more integrative in nature, both cognitively and semantically.

In this article we explore the creative recontextualization of JOURNEY, WAR, RACE and SPORTS metaphors and discuss their manifestations in multimodal ICT advertisements across time. Our objectives are to discuss (i) the choices of metaphors and related source domains used to describe (e)businesses in two different time periods, (ii) how the highlighting and hiding of features of the source domains remain constant or change, (iii) the relations between modes, and (iv) the discursive strategies for metaphorical creativity. The results of our analysis reflect an interesting shift in the highlighting and hiding of features of the main metaphors and related sources across the two time periods, thus revealing variations in emergent metaphors across time. We argue that these results reflect ongoing social changes which illustrate the contextual basis and motivation of metaphor as a linguistic form of action and creative communication in advertising discourse.

This article examines “Purificación García” advertising campaigns from 1999 to 2013, showing them to be consistently driven by pictorial metonymy. The campaigns systematically use pictorial images, dispensing with ad hoc explanatory linguistic material and do not portray end commercial products. Initial puzzlement is offset by the perception of a metonymic link that leads to the textile world in all cases. Our analysis reveals three recurrent structural patterns: two distinct metonymy sources, metonymic blends arising from the co-occurrence of the two metonymic sources and metonymy motivating metaphor. We argue that the maintenance of this strategy over the years establishes a family resemblance with successive campaigns setting up an anaphoric relationship with preceding ones, thereby mitigating puzzlement and favouring understanding. Creativity derives from the figurative twists given to literally mundane objects, from the metonymic sources, their blends and from the resulting metaphors.

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.