The use of monomodal and multimodal metaphors in advertising Jordanian and American food products on Facebook: A comparative study

Abstract

This study investigates the use of monomodal and multimodal metaphors in Jordanian and American advertisements for promoting food products on Facebook. 180 advertisements including monomodal and multimodal metaphors were collected from the Facebook pages of 12 famous restaurants in Jordan and the USA. The analysis shows that monomodal and multimodal metaphors could be used as a persuasive strategy in food advertisements not to facilitate understanding of the target domain since the latter is concrete, but to create imaginative depictions of the advertised product, making it more appealing to consumers. The results show that contextual monomodal metaphors are pervasive in the corpus since they allow advertisers to make their advertisements more memorable and open the door for more engagement by the viewers in interpreting the metaphors. The results also reveal that culture-specific metaphors in food advertisements could be used to show viewers they are an important part of the advertising process.

Keywords

• Cognitive linguistics
• Semiotics
• Metaphor
• Modality
• Culture