The Effect Of Aptness,(A)Symmetry And Verbal Features On The Reversibility Of Pictorial Metaphors

Advertising pictorial metaphor,as one of the effective ways to enhance brand awareness and increase brand value,has drawn many scholarly attention in recent years.Previous studies have found that for some pictorial metaphors it is difficult to identify the target products due to the openness of information interpretation in the multimodal context,which leads to the inefficiency or ineffectiveness of cognitive processing of advertising metaphors.This is closely related to the direction of cross-domain mapping in metaphor comprehension.Guided by the multimodal theory,structure-mapping theory and the conceptual blending theory,with the tool of E-prime and SPSS,this paper employed three behavioral experiments to examine the reversibility of pictorial metaphor,and identified the effects of aptness,(a)symmetry,and verbally-presented features on the reversibility of pictorial metaphors.In Experiment One,which used image judging task and observed participants’ reaction time and accuracy,it was found that forward metaphors and reversed metaphors were both processed and both harder to be processed than literal true statements.This indicated the emergence of reversibility,with the influence of aptness on reversibility being identified,that is,the processing speed of pictorial metaphors of high aptness was faster,leading to an inhibiting effect on the occurrence of metaphorical reversibility.In Experiment Two,it was found via an image-text matching task that under the condition of symmetrical pictorial metaphors,reversed metaphors were more prone to be comprehended but needed more time for processing.This result confirmed the effect of(a)symmetry of object category on metaphorical reversibility in advertising context.The proposed explanation was that the processing of asymmetric metaphorical image was mainly built on one-way mapping,an unidirectionality facilitating the comprehension of pictorial metaphors which made it less prone to reverse the pictorial metaphors.In Experiment Three,pictorial metaphors with verbal metaphorical features of different kinds were examined to explore the influence of verbal features on the comprehension and liking of pictorial metaphors.The results showed that under the condition of source features and shared features,pictorial metaphors were more likely to be judged as forward.There was no significant difference in the processing speed under the three features,however,pictorial metaphors with shared features were the most appreciated,that is,as contextual clues,the source domain features and shared features of verbal forms can effectively facilitate the metaphor comprehension,producing more effective cognitive and emotional responses,which might inhibit the reversibility.This study enriches the empirical research of multimodal metaphor in cognitive linguistics,supporting and demonstrating the possibility of bidirectional co-activation of target domain and source domain concepts before the unidirectional projection of metaphor mapping in multimodal context;meanwhile,based on the optimal cognitive and emotional effects of moderate reversibility,this paper proposed for advertising design the construction mode of advertising pictorial metaphor which should be characterized by an integration of moderate aptness,asymmetric pattern image representation and verbal clues of shared features.