278 Chapter Thirteen
To identify pictorial metonymies in the billboards, I use the definition
provided by Forceville (2009/b), which relies on the same properties
proposed for linguistic metonymy in cognitive linguistics literature. He
maintains that a “metonym consists of a source concept, which via a cue in
a certain mode (language, music, sound, gesture), allows the metonym’s
addressee to infer the target referent” (Forceville 2009/b: 69). Moreover,
the source concept perspectivizes the target concept in a certain manner
intended by the communicator in a given context and that both elements of
a visual metonymy pertain to a single frame/domain. Last but not least, the
relationship between the source and target concept in a nonlinguistic
metonymy is based on contiguity (ibid: 56-71). For example, the
recognition of the RESULT FOR ACTION (HAPPINESS FOR THE CAUSE OF
HAPPINESS) metonymy in one of the billboards is cued by smiling faces of
the family (the result/the effect) and the text which encourages families to
have more children (the action). The relationship between happiness and a
having a large family is not a conventional one and is only contextually
created via metonymy to affect the opinions of the addressees. All
illustrations in the paper seem to fit into the theoretical model of visual
metaphor and metonymy proposed by Forceville.
Finding out the way various contextual factors that influence the
formation of particular figurative meanings in both the political discourse
and the billboards is the major goal of the research. Therefore, the rest of
this section will be devoted to enumerating major tenets of Kövecses’
(2015) account of metaphor in context and the applicability of the model
to the present research. Although this theory has been designed for verbal
metaphors, it can usefully be applied to the analysis of metaphors in other
modalities given the conceptual nature of figurative meaning.
The central point in Kövecses’s approach to metaphoric meaning is
that metaphor does not simply arise from systematic correspondences
between two domains on the basis of correlations in experience or
resemblance, but rather from the joint operation of a set of contextual
factors (Kövecses 2015: 1). A further property of this account is that not
only local features of the situation (more immediate features, such as
physical setting), but more global elements, such as cultural norms, values,
ideology and entrenched figurative part of the conceptual system are also
included as contextual factors. However, the influence or existence of
these elements is determined by their degree of relevance to a given
metaphoric meaning.
Contextual factors in Kövecses’s theory are divided into four major
categories: