Metaphor in contemporary English-language advertising discourse

Abstract

The article examines metaphor as an important instrument of contemporary English-language advertising discourse. The relevance of the study is determined by the growing role of emotional and figurative elements in advertising and by the shift in advertising communication from providing information toward constructing a particular image of a product or brand and shaping potential interpretations of an advertising message. The study approaches metaphor not only as a means of linguistic expression but also as a mechanism for conceptualizing reality, enabling the transfer of features and properties between different domains of experience and creating cognitive and pragmatic conditions for the interpretation of an advertising message. The paper considers theoretical approaches to metaphor, ranging from its classical rhetorical interpretation to contemporary cognitive theories. Particular attention is paid to metaphor as a mechanism of conceptualization that structures human experience and influences potential interpretations of advertising messages. The research material comprises 184 metaphorical units selected from advertisements of international brands presented on official company websites, in digital media, advertising archives, and creative platforms. The sample is purposive and criterion-based and represents the selected corpus of advertising materials rather than contemporary English-language advertising discourse as a whole. Semantic-cognitive and cognitive-conceptual analyses made it possible to identify the following types of metaphors: personification metaphors (25%), nature-related metaphors (23.9%), spatial metaphors (22.8%), military and force-related metaphors (20.7%), and technological metaphors (7.6%). The classification was based on the dominant source domain and the nature of conceptual transfer, while metaphoricality was distinguished from mere figurativeness and evaluative meaning. Particular attention is devoted to the conceptual metaphorical models PRODUCT – NATURE, PRODUCT – ENERGY/FORCE, PRODUCT – EMOTION/VALUE, PRODUCT – PERSON, PRODUCT – JOURNEY/MOVEMENT, and PRODUCT – TECHNOLOGY/SYSTEM, within which a product is conceptualized through different domains of experience. The analysis shows that these models may activate particular associative, emotional, and value-related connotations and suggest potential ways of interpreting the advertised product. The study concludes that metaphor remains an effective means of organizing advertising messages, contributing to their emotional intensity, persuasive potential, and cultural relevance. Further research may focus on the representation of conceptual metaphors in neural machine translation and on the ability of such systems to preserve their meaning and pragmatic effect.