Deliberate Conventional Metaphor in Images: The Case of Corporate Branding Discourse

Abstract

Recent discussions on the use of metaphor have centered on how it may be used in a way that has been said to require mandatory attention to the fact that it is metaphorical, resulting in what has come to be known as deliberate metaphor (Steen, 2008). While metaphor deliberateness and conventionality/novelty are conceptually distinct, associations are likely to exist in practice. This article focuses on the deliberate use of conventional metaphor in images, by way of examining the use of animate and anthropomorphic metaphors in an instance of corporate branding discourse (i.e., the prospectuses of Singapore's corporatized universities). Through our analysis, we show that deliberate conventional metaphor serves to reinforce particular conceptualizations rather than effect radical conceptual change. Moreover, we discuss visual and multimodal metaphor as deliberate if used in carefully crafted texts and draw on the notion of an image's connotative meaning to point out how such deliberateness can be further accentuated. The article concludes by discussing some implications for how the degree of conventionality is likely to have an effect on how deliberate metaphor achieves its key objective of changing addressees’ concepts of a particular Target.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors thank Elena Semino, Ray Gibbs, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. The authors also thank the Singapore Management University for permission to reproduce Figures 1 and 2.

Notes

¹Here, and in the following, the metaphoric expressions that are relevant to our discussion appear in boldface.

²Singapore's other corporatized universities are the National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and, most recently, the Singapore University of Technology and Design. While we will focus on examples from SMU, we will on occasion draw on material from NUS and NTU as well.

³It should be noted that this view of the corporate brand as reflecting an organization's identity is by no means uncontested in the literature on branding. Koller (2009b), for example, conceives of corporate branding as communicating the organization's ideal self as a model of a possible future self. The organization's identity may undergo transformation as the corporate brand, as the communicated ideal, becomes a model of aspiration which the organization seeks to approximate. In addition, Christensen and Askegaard (2001) point out that access to the organization's identity is only ever possible through the way it is represented. In this regard, corporate branding can be seen as producing the organizational identity that it putatively projects (see also Cornelissen, Christensen, & Kinuthia, 2012; Melewar, Gotsi, & Andriopoulos, 2012).

⁴The conventionality of the “FORWARD MOVEMENT” metaphor also shows in the fact that “progress” etymologically derives from classical Latin for “to go forward,” while the verb “advance” can be traced back to the Old French equivalent (Oxford English Dictionary, http://www.oed.com).

⁵ Koller (2008) has shown how in corporate branding texts, metaphor and metonymy are often cohesively linked through juxtaposition and anaphora within and across clauses as well as across sentences (e.g., “the clear line of the company determines our route”).

⁶The 2.3-million-word sampler of the British National Corpus (http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/) records a log likelihood value of 448.86 for “problem” as a collocate within three words to the left or right of “solv*” and 54.7 for the collocate “problems,” making both significant at p < .0001 (critical value = 15.13).