Analysis of Baby-Boom Promoting Billboards in Iran
275the major emphasis in the paper is placed on political ideology and
cultural-religious concepts in Iranian culture since they, as data analysis
will indicate, are extensively employed to highlight the advantages of the
new plan and the disadvantages of the previous family planning project.
Verbo-pictorial billboards combine text and image to get across a
particular message to the envisaged addressees. Billboards typically “make
sparing use of text” (Forceville 1996: 161) and much of the content is
provided pictorially. Crucial to the production and interpretation of
meaning in verbo-pictorial billboards are conceptual metaphor and
metonymy, which are manifested multimodally (Forceville 1996, 2009a,
2009b; Yu 2009; Maalej 2015). Verbo-pictorial metaphors are multimodal
meaning that their “target and source are not, or not exclusively, rendered
in the same mode” (Forceville 2007: 16). Verbo-pictorial metonymies are
also multimodal in the sense that “the pictorial parts only assume
metonymic status because of the link to the textual parts” (Forceville
2009b: 63). To reframe a contested issue like population control, metaphor
and metonymy are ideal cognitive tools thanks to their capability to
highlight and hide aspects of situations and events (Lakoff & Johnson
1980, Kövecses 2002) which license shifting from one policy to another.
Furthermore, conceptual metonymy plays a crucial role in creating social
and political stereotypes (Lakoff 1987). This particular role of metonymy
can be explicitly seen in both political discourse and billboards of
population control, especially as a means of evaluating western lifestyle
negatively.
Conceptual metaphor has shown to be the carrier of the ideological
perspective (Lakoff 1996, Chilton & Lakoff 1995, Charteris-Black 2004,
2007, 2009, Goatly 2007, Santa Ana 1999, Zinken 2003). The common
finding of most of the research adopting a metaphor approach to ideology
is that each conceptual metaphor imposes its own particular perspective
through the metaphorical linguistic expressions chosen. Moreover, metaphors
are systematically used as instruments of social control for organizations,
mass media and other institutions (Fairclough 1989: 36). In the case of
Iranian officials’ remarks on population increase, metaphor, while
perspectivizing the target meaning, provides a basis for social-political
evaluation of proponents and opponents of the plan.
History of population control policies in Iran
Since the Islamic revolution in 1979, the Iranian government’s policy
toward population control has changed three times. In the early1980s, the
founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a decree to