Article published In: Embodied, Social, and Creative Dimensions of Metonymy
Edited by Marlene Johansson Falck and Thomas Wiben Jensen
[Metaphor and the Social World 15:2] 2025
► pp. 288–313
Creative visual and multimodal metonymy in non-commercial advertisements on substance use
Published online: 22 September 2025
https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.24028.hid
https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.24028.hid
Abstract
Non-commercial advertising is an appealing genre for the study of the social implications of the use of creative
figurativity, as it allows us to explore the creative strategies used to engage the addressee’s attention to take courses of
action. The present paper focuses on the role of creative visual and multimodal metonymies and their interaction with metaphoric
domains in multimodal advertising campaigns addressing substance use (smoking, alcohol, drugs). The data consists of a corpus of
50 advertisements. Results show the more frequent metonymies in the corpus are part for whole, effect for cause, container for
contained and category for salient property. Metonymy typically supports metaphoric processes, is more
frequently visual rather than multimodal and contributes to accessing scenarios and narratives that highlight the negative
properties and effects of substance use. Creative uses of metonymy involve visual impact relying on the juxtaposition of
metonymies which enable resemblance metaphors, elaboration of conventional metonymies, interaction with hyperbole and irony, and
twice true metonymies.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Theoretical concepts: Metonymy in non-commercial advertising
- 2.1Metonymy and creativity in multimodal discourse
- 2.2Non-commercial advertising addressing substance use prevention
- 3.Data and method
- 3.1Data
- 3.2Method and analytical procedure
- 4.Results and discussion
- 4.1Analysis of representative examples from the advertising campaigns
- 4.1Results
- 4.1.1RQ1. Types of metonymies
- 4.1.2RQ2. Interaction with metaphor
- 4.1.3RQ3. Modality
- 4.2RQ4. Creative strategies and functions of metonymy
- 5.Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
References
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