Designing a Typology for Visual Rhetoric with a Focus on the Interaction of Metaphor and Metonymy in Print Advertising

The aim of the present study is to investigate the interaction of visual metaphor and metonymy in print advertising. The typology of this research, due to the focus on two popular visual tropes in advertising, allows for the analysis of advertisements that do not fit into existing models. This model also facilitates the comprehension of meaning in sophisticated rhetorical ads and develops the concept of rhetoric in advertising images based on the linguistic definitions of Iran and the West. To this end, a multi-case study approach has been used. The cases are more than 500 Iranian and non-Iranian rhetorical ads that have been analyzed based on the semiotics. In fact, by analyzing the signified and signifier of signs in the advertising samples, the interaction of metaphor and metonymy has been identified in the typology of this research for the first time. The findings of this study indicate that conceptual metaphor and metonymy can be used in other media such as visuals, in addition to language. Furthermore, metaphor and metonymy, as two important rhetorical figures and methods of meaning transfer, can interact in advertising images. Therefore, there might be metonymic relations in the target or source of a visual metaphor in advertisements. All rhetorical advertisements that have two salient objects in the image can be analyzed by this typology.