Identifying metaphors in TV commercials with FILMIP: the Filmic Metaphor Identification Procedure

Abstract

The analysis and identification of figurative language is one of the largest research areas in cognitive linguistics, and metaphor is one of these tropes. Focusing on the genre of TV advertising, a structural method for the identification of metaphorical components used in films in a cross-modal fashion is developed in the present paper. A corpus of 11 TV commercials is analyzed under seven steps that guide analysts from the content description of the multimodal materials to the concrete identification of metaphorical elements. This research presents the Filmic Metaphor Identification Procedure (FILMIP, Bort-Mir 2019) as a tool for the identification of metaphorically used filmic components in multimodal filmic materials. More concretely, the paper presents the application of the procedure to two TV commercials from different perfume brands. FILMIP offers a valuable contribution not only to metaphor scholars but also to researchers focused on other fields of study such as multimodality, discourse analysis, communication, branding, or even film theory.