An exploratory content-analytical study into metaphorical display in international print wine advertising.

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2019-06-05
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en
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A growing interest in the use of metaphors in wine-related genres has been observed over time. This thesis systematically examines the occurrence of lexical metaphors in print wine advertising as well as the type of conceptual source domains that shape meaning. Furthermore, it also explores if and to which extent metaphors can be recognized in the images used by advertisers. To this end, a corpus of 2355 print wine advertisements was compiled of which a sample was analyzed for the presence of lexical metaphors, which in turn indicates the presence of underlying structures that shape meaning conceptually through conceptual metaphors. The sample included 17,854 lexical units (i.e. parts of speech) of which 8,663 content words (i.e. nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs) were identified; subsequently, this sample was systematically analyzed for metaphorical display. The results show that 376 lexical metaphors were identified of which 272 lexical metaphors (i.e. 72 percent) actually described WINE in terms of something else. Of these 272 lexical metaphors, a total of 65 percent described WINE as a HUMAN BEING, while 11 percent described it as an OBJECT. These results can be explained as wine advertisers seem to market wines by personifying their product in advertising campaigns and presenting them as if wines were the type of human wine consumers would like to be acquainted to for all sorts of reasons, e.g. likability or seductiveness. This conceptual metaphor seems to be more dominant than in wine reviews in which describing wine’s taste is more salient. Only in some cases (i.e. approximately 1 percent of the sample) were lexical metaphors used to describe sensory information in terms of taste and smell in print wine advertising to help the audience experience the wine. In these cases, meaning is also created by the type of taste-related images included in the advertisement. That personification of wine is mostly used in print wine advertising compared to other conceptual metaphors is an important finding in the understanding of the way in which metaphors are used in this genre, but more research is required to expose how images shape meaning.
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