Reframing the linguistic to analyze the landscape

Abstract

This article examines how eliciting metaphors from multimodal commercials can facilitate a critical interpretation of advertising media, which is ubiquitous in the LL and highly manipulative. Adolescent students, a population which is particularly vulnerable to advertising’s influence, utilized the analytic tool of metaphor elicitation to abstract away from the vast multimodal information that characterizes commercials, and simplify this information in the linguistic formulation of metaphor (e.g., super-pharm is a circus). The contrived link between the given brand (e.g., Super-Pharm pharmaceutical stores) and its metaphorically-attached source domain (e.g., circus) was emphasized to increase awareness of how the commercial was structured to deceive consumers. The study evaluated the intervention using a quasi-experimental design, showing that metaphor elicitation facilitated the knowledge, critical attitudes, and responsible behavioral inclinations of participants concerning advertising media. The study suggests that using the linguistic formulation of metaphor can help adolescents critically interpret the increasingly-deceptive commercial landscape.