Metonymic grounding of ideological metaphors: Evidence from advertising gender metaphors

This paper argues that ideological metaphors can be special cases of conceptual interaction between metaphor and metonymy, along with synecdoche. We focus on a specific type of ideological metaphor, advertising gender metaphors. Within a cognitive semantic–pragmatic framework we have described and analysed the strategies and complex conceptual metaphoric–metonymic/synecdochic patterns in a case study of 292 advertising gender metaphors taken from a corpus of 1610 advertising metaphors present in 1142 commercial ads published in British Cosmopolitan. Metonymy, along with synecdoche, has been shown, as far as the above analysis of advertising gender metaphors is concerned, to precede in all but one of the various types and subtypes of this concrete type of ideological metaphor. The existence of underlying patterns of metonymic (and synecdochic) motivation used for gender assignment is, therefore, proven and evidence is given for Taylor's view (1995:138), that all (ideological) metaphors may necessarily need underlying metonymisations. It also supports Dirven (1993), , Croft (1993), , Barcelona (2000a,b), Radden's (2000), , Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez (2000), and Geeraerts’ (2003) idea of a metaphor–metonymy continuum with the intermediate notion of metonymy-based metaphors.