CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS ANALYSIS
OF BABY-BOOM PROMOTING
BILLBOARDS IN IRAN
MOHSEN BAKHTIAR
Introduction
In 2010, Iranian ex-president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, announced that the
population of the country had sharply dropped as a result of family
planning policies in the last two decades. He warned that in 30 years Iran
would be an aging society and that would lead to the extinction of Iranian
identity (www.bbc.co.uk/persian 16/05/2010). The supreme leader of Iran,
Ayatollah Khamenei also expressed his serious concerns about the
plummeting birthrate and the necessity for doubling the population
(www.uk.reuters.com 27/05/2014). The sudden shift in the current birth
control practices provoked hot debate among proponents and opponents of
the newly adopted policy. Nevertheless, the government ran a propaganda
campaign across the country to encourage young Iranian couples to create
a baby boom. In order to perform the supreme leader’s decree, all
domestic media initiated discussion and emphasized the significance of
having a larger population and its positive consequences for family
structure. Among the measures taken, Verbo-pictorial, cartoon-style
billboards put up in Tehran and other cities are an important means of
advertising the population increase plan so that more couples are
persuaded to expand their families.
The present paper focuses on the role of contextual factors involved in
the construction of figurative meaning in baby boom-promoting billboards
in Iran based on Kövecses’ (2015) account of metaphor in context. In
addition to metaphor, I also investigate the equally important role of
conceptual metonymy and categorization in producing the meaning that
both Iranian authorities and the billboard designers intend to convey i.e.
persuading couples to have more children. Apart from cognitive processes,