Abstract

This article studies verbo-pictorial metaphors in some informative Persian posters, based on Forceville's cognitive approach to multimodal metaphors. Semiotic and social semiotic studies of nonverbal aspects of message were started respectively by Barthes and Kress and Van Leeoven. However, first in the cognitive semantics, a number of researchers, like Forceville (1994), began studying visual, pictorial, and multimodal aspects of metaphors from a cognitive semantics point of view. Till now, there are little investigations in Persian verbo-pictorial metaphors from this perspective, though many ones are reported in some other languages. In finding the appropriate required data, among eighteen informative categories in Hafteh Informative Poster Website, five subjects were selected. For each subject (total N=236) one poster was selected. The research questions involve: How verbo-pictorial metaphors appear in Persian posters? How the existing pictures and texts interact to represent multimodal metaphors in the selected informative posters? And finally, what is the pragmatic effect of their interaction on conveying the poster message? The results show that the selected posters contain one or more cognitive mechanisms like metaphor, metonymy, symbol, and image schema. The verbal and pictorial metaphors have complementary, though proportionately various, roles in conveying the informative messages of posters. The similarity of source and target domains of verbo-pictorial metaphors are realized either through physical resemblance, filling a schematic slot unexpectedly, and simultaneous cuing of these concepts. Moreover, this study shows that metaphors of this small corpus play informative function in the posters. The pragmatic role of metaphors is performed by both pictorial and verbal modes, though the anchorage role of the text used in these posters is various and cannot be identified clearly.