Metaphor Or Metonymy

METAPHOR OR METONYMY
Javier Marín López

ABSTRACT
The paper provides a view on metaphor and metonymy in advertising and how it is used in the different types of advertising. It was made a research to make people understand the principal reason of using these literary recourses in advertising. It was found that metaphor and metonymy are difficult to use but that they are so common inadvertising and that metonymy is more used than metaphor. The main conclusion is that people can be helped to understand advertisements but even knowing their meaning they will be attracted by advertising even more.


INTRODUCTION
Metaphor is a contextual anomaly which consists in the contrast of two or more concepts that are not related in the conceptual system of the speakers, andmetonymy is a case of language reduction in which the actual referent of a clause, phrase or word does not coincide with the intended referent, but keeps some connection with it, triggering the automatic recovery of the latter and the connections with it (Sako, IFE2:7). As Lakoff and Johnson (1995:1) say, we use metaphor not only in poems and rhetoric, but also in the everyday life. This is importantbecause without some metaphor in our life, it would be so difficult to understand what people say in some contexts and to understand the processes of our conceptual system.
[pic]
Many books have been written on metaphor and metonymy (Lakoff and Johnson: 1995; Sheldon Sacks, 1979). Lots of articles have been written too; see for example the Belen Soria’s article (2000). They havedescribed the concepts and have made them very easy to understand for everybody. However, metaphor and metonymy in advertising is still difficult to understand in advertising if we are not used to study them.
As everyone knows, there are three main types of advertising that are: Audible advertising (it is the one that takes place through the radio and that is created with sounds), visualadvertising (it is the one that has visual material and that is shown on billboards), and audiovisual advertising (the one that uses both audio and visual material and is shown through television).
Following this question, I tried to make metaphor and metonymy in advertising more intelligible for everyone who wants to understand it. I made a research on the use of metaphor and metonymy inadvertisements and the use they have in the different kinds of advertising. The main idea was to know in what areas of advertising are used metaphor and metonymy to create a system of distinction in which to rely in order to become able to understand this use in advertising and the purpose that it is given nowadays.


METHODOLOGY
I began to prepare my research trying to find some metaphor andmetonymy advertisements examples on the web. When I started, I found out lots of examples but without seeing any differences at the beginning; as I said at the Introduction paragraph, it is difficult to find any metaphor or metonymy if you are not used to study them. Firstly, I began watching visual advertisements, realizing that loads of metonymy and metaphor were into them to make consumers buyeverything they saw. When I was about to finish of watching all of them I started to realize where there was metaphor or metonymy and how it was used. I began to discuss if visual advertising had more metaphor or than metonymy or backwards. I had to write down any case of metaphor and metonymy I saw and contrast them to know which one was the most used. With the other two advertising types I made thesame as I did with visual.
[pic]
In most of the cases, there was as metaphor as metonymy, making it more difficult to understand not only the meaning of the advertisement but also the union of both.
When I began to hear audible advertising, it was a little bit difficult at the beginning but as soon as I heard the last advertisement, I began to find some metaphor in some of...