Multimodal Metaphor Analysis of Print Advertisements Based on the Conceptual Blending Theory: Exploring the Hidden Ideology---Sign-Consumption
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In today’s industrial society with great affluence in material goods, consumption in our mind no longer aims at objective function, but at the sign-value connoted in the objects. Advertisement is the main carrier of sign-consumption ideology with rich multimodal metaphorical resources. This study follows the analytical mode of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), by analyzing multimodal metaphor in print magazine advertisement from the perspective of Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) to explore the hidden sign-consumption ideology. The main findings of the research are: 1) metaphors in selected ads are all novel metaphors, in which the target domain is always presented by the advertised products while source domain is always presented in form of image; 2) counterpart correspondences mapped between two input spaces are the imposed selling points and sign-value, which take the main marketing functions; 3) relegating and weakening the objective function but advocating sign-value of goods is essentially because of people’s desire for differentiation in homogenized industrial society, which would allow the market more space to conduct secondary exploitation to people instead of labor exploitation. This interdisciplinary study not only adds new content to linguistics but also provides new perspective to consumption issue of sociology and economics. Besides, it provides a rational warning for people to reflect their consumption behavior.In today’s industrial society with great affluence in material goods, consumption in our mind no longer aims at objective function, but at the sign-value connoted in the objects. Advertisement is the main carrier of sign-consumption ideology with rich multimodal metaphorical resources. This study follows the analytical mode of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), by analyzing multimodal metaphor in print magazine advertisement from the perspective of Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) to explore the hidden sign-consumption ideology. The main findings of the research are: 1) metaphors in selected ads are all novel metaphors, in which the target domain is always presented by the advertised products while source domain is always presented in form of image; 2) counterpart correspondences mapped between two input spaces are the imposed selling points and sign-value, which take the main marketing functions; 3) relegating and weakening the objective function but advocating sign-value of goods is essentially because of people’s desire for differentiation in homogenized industrial society, which would allow the market more space to conduct secondary exploitation to people instead of labor exploitation. This interdisciplinary study not only adds new content to linguistics but also provides new perspective to consumption issue of sociology and economics. Besides, it provides a rational warning for people to reflect their consumption behavior.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".