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Category: Project

Description: The present article explores (1) how the themes of global warming, climate change, pollution and activism are conceptualized in a corpus of 51 non-commercial advertisements, (2) the distribution across verbal and visual modes of source and target domains, (3) the interaction of metonymy with metaphor, and (4) how value is evoked. Our findings show that half of the corpus frames environmental themes through source domains such as weapons, predators and natural disasters. The other half triggers incongruous mappings, such as between concrete entities, and relies on metonymic processes of inference to access the main rhetorical message. Among the most frequent metonymies, CAUSE-EFFECT and CATEGORY FOR SALIENT PROPERTY highlight the negative effects of the represented phenomena. Multimodality usually occurs within source and/or target domains rather than across the metaphoric mapping. Most of the campaigns project mixed value, where a negative evaluation of a theme is accompanied by a positive message, inviting the audience to take action.