The Creative Use of Idioms in Advertising

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the cognitive mechanisms involved in the creative exploitation of idiomatic expressions in advertisements. In line with Grady et al. (1999), the analysis is based on the complementing theories of conceptual metaphor and conceptual blending, each handling different aspects of the complex message. Assuming that idioms are motivated by conventional images and metaphorical mappings (cf. Lakoff 1987, Kövecses and Szabó (1996), Gibbs (1997) etc.), it is argued that these conceptual metaphors form the basis of creative blends, which in some respects are similar to the pattern referred to as “double grounding” (Feyaerts and Brône 2002).