A COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS ANALYSIS OF THE USE OF METAPHORS IN ENGLISH CAR ADVERTISEMENTS

English car advertising shows the frequent use of metaphors as structuring tools of advertisements. Based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), the study investigates the cognitive function of metaphors in order to understand how they are skilfully used by advertisers to change consumers’ perception and persuade them to buy the product. It is designed around a corpus of sixty-one car advertisements and the content analysis of forty-six of them. The focus of the analysis is on the description and the cognitive processes used to persuade potential consumers. The results show that metaphors help to shift consumers’ attention towards the source domain and to create a new way of perceiving the car by mapping it to entities, activities or phenomena that carry some stimulating positive feature.