Creative visual and multimodal metonymy in non-commercial advertisements on substance use

Abstract Non-commercial advertising is an appealing genre for the study of the social implications of the use of creative figurativity, as it allows us to explore the creative strategies used to engage the addressee’s attention to take courses of action. The present paper focuses on the role of creative visual and multimodal metonymies and their interaction with metaphoric domains in multimodal advertising campaigns addressing substance use (smoking, alcohol, drugs). The data consists of a corpus of 50 advertisements. Results show the more frequent metonymies in the corpus are part for whole, effect for cause, container for contained and category for salient property . Metonymy typically supports metaphoric processes, is more frequently visual rather than multimodal and contributes to accessing scenarios and narratives that highlight the negative properties and effects of substance use. Creative uses of metonymy involve visual impact relying on the juxtaposition of metonymies which enable resemblance metaphors, elaboration of conventional metonymies, interaction with hyperbole and irony, and twice true metonymies.