The Comparison of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Blending in Explaining the Metaphoric Advertisements in Some Iranian Family Journals

Over the last years, some studies have been done about the role of metaphor and conceptual blending (CB) in advertisements, but none of them have compared the two recent theories of metaphor, namely, conceptual metaphor and conceptual blending. Accordingly, the present study is an attempt, first, to study metaphor from the standpoint of these two theories and, second, to compare their effectiveness in explaining the metaphoric advertisements of some Iranian family journals. With this purpose in mind, 5 metaphoric adverts were chosen from the journals under investigation. To discover how the addressees understand the metaphoric adverts and to examine the effectiveness of the two theories, the adverts were shown to 30 college students. They were asked to identify the metaphor used in the adverts and to explain why the advertiser had used such a metaphor. The findings of the research show that conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) cannot explain metaphoric advertisements completely and conceptual blending should be used to explain metaphoric adverts as well. They also indicate that idiomatic expressions employed in these kinds of adverts cannot be explained by conceptual metaphor theory at all. Moreover, when conceptual blending was used in data analysis, it was observed that the adverts can be divided according to the network divisions: simplex networks, mirror networks, single-scope networks, and double-scope networks, as given in this theory.