Thesis title: Synergistic application of metaphorical and humorous elements in Polish and English advertising discourse
The following dissertation aims at presenting and analysing the synergistic application of metaphorical and humorous elements in Polish and English multimodal press ads. The presence of conceptual similarities as regards both construction and understanding of humour and metaphor, seen through the lens of the theory of conceptual integration, is a starting point for a discussion on the co-occurrence of metaphorical and humorous elements in advertising discourse. The following chapters therefore present a range of research topics connected with advertising, metaphor, and humour. As far as the structure of the thesis is concerned, it consists of five parts.
The introductory first chapter focuses on the notion of advertising, its purposes, and operation. It is also concerned with various typologies of ads, according to the target audience, area, purpose, and medium. Then, it centres on the verbal and visual facets of advertising with a view to presenting how different modalities complement each other to produce multimodal messages. Chapter 1 also touches upon the general aspects of communication studies, semantics, and pragmatics, thus providing the reader with necessary theoretical background on the study of advertising discourse.
Chapter 2, on the other hand, presents the theoretical foundations of research on metaphor and cognitive studies. The author refers to the theory of conceptual metaphors proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (2003/1980) and to the theory of mental spaces (Fauconnier 1994, 1997, 1998). Next, she adumbrates the theory of conceptual integration (conceptual blending theory) (Fauconnier and Turner 1998, 2002), which puts emphasis on the process of partial mappings between mental spaces, thanks to which some conceptual structures are transferred to other. The chapter also explores existing studies on verbal, visual, and multimodal metaphor in advertising. Given the focus of the thesis, multimodality is given prominence.
The following chapter is devoted to humour studies. It differentiates between various shades of humour based on semantic distinction put forward by Schmidt-Hidding (1963) and described in more detail by Hempelmann (2017). The author also discusses various yet closely related factors which influence the perception of humour. Furthermore, Chapter 3 outlines three renowned theories of humour, which include the superiority, relief, and incongruity-resolution theories (Hurley, Dennett and Adams 2017), the last of which is the main axis of discussion. Apart from the linguistic theories of humour (Raskin 1985; Attardo and Raskin 1991; Attardo 1994), the chapter addresses the role of the prototype theory (Rosch 1973; Rosch and Mervis 1975) in shaping humour and its strength.
Discussion on previous research into humour in advertising ensues and, finally, the similarities in the conceptual operations involved in the creation and understanding of both humour and metaphor are emphasised. The observation that such common features exist is made on the basis of the works by Attardo (1994, 2006, 2015), Brône and Feyaerts (2003), Dynel (2009), Kyratzis (2003), and Müller (2015), all of whom see the theory of conceptual integration by Fauconnier and Turner (1998, 2002) and the prototype theory (Rosch 1973; Rosch and Mervis 1975) as a common denominator of metaphor and humour. Naturally, the pragmatic and semantic theories mentioned in Chapter 1 are no less important.
Chapter 4 aims at presenting and analysing the synergistic operation of metaphor and humour in multimodal press ads. The selection of specific ads to be analysed was therefore determined by the simultaneous use of humour and metaphor. Firstly, the methodological section clarified the data collection procedure and research methodology, as well as described the scope of the study, research objectives, and the group of research participants. For the purpose of the thesis, a corpus of one hundred press ads in English and one hundred ads in Polish was gathered. The author selected twenty examples from each language group and performed a qualitative content analysis, which made it possible to examine the joint workings of metaphor and humour in press ads.
The following part of the chapter focused on checking ad liking and affective attitudes of the informants, accomplished by having each research participant rate a set of humorous figurative ads on a Likert-type scale. Also, the perceived funniness levels of the ads sampled were examined thanks to the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) method (cf. Lang 1980; Morris and Waine 1993), which, based on an intuitive visual self-report, allows to determine the appreciation of humour value and the persuasive power of ads, along with the levels of stimulation of the perceiver. An additional open-ended questionnaire on ad comprehension was implemented to check how the informants understood the mechanisms inducing humour and metaphor in ads. In Chapter 4, the author thus shows the results of both surveys, referring to a wealth of pertinent examples.
The final chapter presents conclusions on the qualitative content analysis, ad ratings, emotional responses, and ad comprehension. The results provide valuable insights into the workings of metaphor and humour applied synergistically in multimodal press ads; they also allow for the identification of both similarities and differences between the two language samples. It turns out that the use of metaphor and humour in tandem is much more common in the ads in English, while the ludic function in Polish press ads usually rests on superiority humour, puns, and wordplay. The examples of the simultaneous use of metaphor and incongruity-resolution-based humour in selected ads from both language samples prove that the ads in English create more diversified conceptual, formal, and functional structures. The material analysed showed that visual metaphor and visual humour were more common in English ads, while the ads in Polish opted for multimodal varieties of both metaphor and humour. Furthermore, the sample in Polish was found to be less diversified as regards the cross-modal humour-metaphor relations.
It was observed that multimodal metaphor coupled with multimodal humour fared better in terms of ad ratings, emotional responses, and perceived funniness of the ads sampled, as opposed to visual metaphor and humour. The ads produced by more than one semiotic code, at the level of both metaphor and humour, were thus rated higher. Based on her analysis and surveys, the author argued that the increase in non-prototypicality of the element within a given category is directly proportional to the increase in humour value, in line with such researchers as Nerhardt (1976), Giora (1991), and Chen and Jiang (2018). The topic of ad comprehension by research participants received consideration as well. The majority of ads was decoded properly but the informants often had problems with description of the metaphors analysed, as well as with the identification of the conceptual domains involved, especially when metaphor co-occurred with metonymy, parody or satire. Another observation is that the textual facilitated ad comprehension and that broadly conceived incongruity, unusual resemblance, and unexpected form or content were identified as the main carriers of humour.
The dissertation closes with a short presentation of the possible limitations of the study, suggesting avenues for further research in the field of multimodal press advertising which combines metaphor and humour in tandem.