Abstract

Advertisers, as keen observers of reality, pay very much attention to how their messages are delivered. Being aware that people feel happier with the idea of foods that are natural rather than synthetic, they use common language so as to mean something to the consumer. Having a limited amount of space in order to try to capture the potential consumer’s attention, an advertiser will always make conventional usage more attractive.  For this purpose he will highlight the product’s quality by making associations between the product and something that already possesses the characteristics he needs to claim for the product. This is, as Lakoff and Johnson state, the very essence of metaphor, “understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.” (Lakoff, Johnson, 2003: 5)  Advertising does something similar to metaphors; it borrows characteristics from structured domains of human experience and transposes them to the product advertised for the purpose of being noticed among other ads. The reason for such an article is to investigate the rich corpus offered by advertisements in order to exploit its linguistic choices.