Esther Serwaah Afreh

The study proposes a cognitive linguistic study of the various ways in which conceptual metaphor and related cognitive processes such as metonymy and blending are exploited for creative purposes in advertising texts and accompanying images in Ghanaian magazines. The focus is on the identification of conventional metaphors and on their elaboration and use as a creative basis. The data will consist of advertisements that will be collected from Ghanaian magazines between the years 2006 and 2012. Although the textual content forms the starting point, significant attention will also be paid to the interplay between text and image. Using tools provided by both conceptual metaphor theory and blending theory, which are seen as complementary theories, detailed qualitative analyses of representative advertisements of how the metaphorical content is signalled are made.