THE FREQUENCY OF THE CONCEPTS “UP” AND “DOWN” IN ENGLISH ADVERTISING: A COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS PERSPECTIVE

Research on metaphors has found that the concepts UP and DOWN are metaphorically structured. This theoretical finding can be tested in advertising, by comparing the frequency of use of both concepts in order to determine whether that frequency coheres with the finding in theory. On the basis of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT),the study investigates the relationship between the metaphorical meaning of UP / DOWN and their frequency of use in advertising. It is based on a corpus of forty-nine internet advertisements from which UP / DOWN are retrieved and counted to determine the percentage of each concept. The results show that the concept UP is more frequent than the concept DOWN. This unequal frequency is coherent with their metaphorical meanings known in theory.