The Psycho-Semantico Moxie of Metaphorical Drives in Advert Texting

Abstract

This paper investigates metaphorical usages in advertising from a psycho-semantic perspective. It argues that metaphor is employed in advertising texts deliberately to conceptualize one concept in terms of another which has well-defined and structured experience-able effect. Semantically, one semantic domain is expanded to another in a process of simulation to the targeted concept. Psychologically, the paper attempts to show the positively achieved attitudes by the use of metaphor in ads texts. Metaphor provides relational or sentential innovations to map unpredictable yet meaningful imagistic textuality guaranteeing interactive quest in general. The data analyzed are ads texts collected randomly from net sources containing clear or implicit metaphorical usages. The approach is purely cognitive, qualitative one. Analysis depends on the theory of conceptual metaphor by Lackoff and Johnson 1980. The results show that advertising, as a genre, is a parable process of emulation and stimulation of one concept in terms of another, which is more familiar and affective by employing deviant's adds-on imagistic mosaic of metaphorical image. Per se, adverts' texting is dependent on the observeability, of the linguistic aspects of texts and on the persuasiveness of the discourse.