Metaphorical creativity and recontextualization in multimodal advertisements on e-business across time

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.