Overtness-covertness in advertising gender metaphors

Abstract

This paper aims at demonstrating that weak communication (overt and covert) can have an important influence on the choice, specification and interpretation of ideological metaphors in advertising. We focus here on a concrete type of ideological metaphor, advertising gender metaphor. We present a description of advertising gender metaphors, subtypes (cases of metaphorical gender, universal gender metaphors and cultural gender metaphors) and crosscategorisation in a case study of 1142 adverts published in British Cosmopolitan (years 1999 and 2000). We next assess “overtness-covertness” in the advertising gender metaphors in our sample. In considering this we also look at the conventional-innovative scale of these metaphors, and examine their discrimination against men and women. The intended value of this paper lies in its examination of both weak overt and covert types of communication in relation both to cognitive and pragmatic theorising of metaphor, and, more generally, to theorising advertising communication.