Primary metaphors in advertising: An analysis of tangible vs. intangible products printed advertisements

Primary meta-phors are focal points for the present-day global advertising industry (Ortiz, 2010, 2011; Pérez-Hernández, 2013b, 2014, 2019; Pérez-Sobrino, 2017). Nev-ertheless, there is little research on how they operate in relation to the nature of different prod-ucts/services. This paper aims to provide (1) insights into the pervasiveness and functioning of multimodal primary metaphors in printed advertisements; and (2) a thorough analysis on their productivity in relation to the na-ture (material vs. immaterial) of the target product. The analysis of a corpus of 300 printed ads reveals that primary metaphors largely outnumber resemblance metaphors in the advertisements under scrutiny. It provides a detailed inventory of the source and target domains involved, and a description of the interaction patterns between primary meta-phors and the product/service. The analysis of the data unveils a higher frequency of occurrence of primary metaphor mappings in relation to tangible products and elucidates reasons for this attested trend.