GENERAL RHETORIC: A MODEL FOR ANALYZING SYNECDOCHE, METAPHOR, AND METONYMY, AND ITS APPLICATION TO THE POSTER

This study developed from an awareness of the presence and impact of figurative meaning in the mass-produced image and the need to educate the public to an awareness of the same and to pictorial-verbal literacy. Hence, the specific purpose of this dissertation is one of extending the theory of "General Rhetoric," constructed in 1970 by a team of Belgian linguists, as the model for the analysis of figurative meaning in the poster and to illustrate the workings of the model though responses collected from poster viewers.;The study briefly describes how the poster developed from a mainly verbal medium to a powerful tool of pictorial-verbal communication. It reviews macro and micro approaches to the study of meaning in verbal and pictorial-verbal representations. It presents the theoretical concepts of General Rhetoric, while comparing them to those of other schools of rhetoric. It explains the specific processes of meaning transfer involved in the production of synecdoche, metaphor, and metonymy.;With the aid of a schema containing descriptions, diagrams, pictorial and verbal examples of synecdoche, metaphor, and metonymy, the study applies General Rhetoric to the specific analysis of seven posters containing variations of those three figures. The design and results of a "Poster Study" administered to eighteen high-school students are reported to illustrate the relevance of General Rhetoric's model and the schema as instructional tools for the development of figurative literacy in pictorial-verbal representations.