Analysis of Baby-Boom Promoting Billboards in Iran
277statements were recovered from an article published on 04/01/2011 in
Khabar Online (www.khabaronline.ir), a Persian news agency. The article
contains a collection of his statements regarding the population increase
plan. The statements cover a period of 3 years from 04/04/2010 to
23/04/2013. The billboards analyzed in the paper, 9 in total, were collected
from the website of Owj Media Production (www. owjmedia.com), an
advertisement company in charge of designing the billboards. The
billboards encompass a period of 2 years from 08/2011 to 09/2013.
Semantic incongruity between the primary or basic meaning of lexical
items and their contextual meanings is the basis for identifying verbal
metaphors in the political statements, following Metaphor Identification
Procedure (Pragglejaz 2007). In the case of billboards, following
Forceville (1996), homospatiality and incompatibility of two physically
salient elements (or co-referentiality of two incompatible elements) are the
criteria for the identification of pictorial metaphors in the billboards.
Moreover, there should be features to be mapped from the source domain
onto the target domain on the basis of a perceived similarity between the
components of the metaphor. Another delimiting criterion is that it is
presumed that the maker intends the metaphorical relation to be perceived
as such and the viewer is aware of this intention (Forceville 2001: 3). This
latter criterion also applies to the visual manifestations of metonymy. In
order to clarify how this framework is used to identify metaphors in the
billboards, I briefly provide an example. One billboard pictures a
sweating, young boy carrying a number of senior citizens by couch bike
on a steep road. The text at the top of the picture reads: ‘More Children, A
Younger Society’. The metaphorical relationship between SENIOR
CITIZENS and IMPEDIMENT in the SENIOR CITIZENS ARE IMPEDIMENTS TO
PROGRESS metaphor is cued by the slogan which evokes the target
meaning (building up a younger society by making more children). The
other aspect of target domain, i.e. MAKING PROGRESS is pictorially
represented by the steep road. The semantic clash or contrast between the
target and source domain resides in what the slogan provides (the need to
procreate so as to have a young society) and what the picture illustrates, an
aged society which is depicted by showing some weak, old people
outnumbering the only young boy and the hardship he bears to carry the
senior citizens. Given that, a set of similarity-based correspondences can
be imagined between the two domains; the path corresponds to the line of
progress; the senior citizens correspond to the impediments to progress;
the sweat on the boy’s face and the steepness of the path correspond to the
difficulties on the way of progress, and so forth.