Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2006) 1982–2002

www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

Towards a critical cognitive–pragmatic approach to

gender metaphors in Advertising English
Marisol Velasco-Sacristán, Pedro A. Fuertes-Olivera *
Universidad de Valladolid, Escuela Universitaria de Estudios Empresariales,
Paseo del Prado de la Magdalena s/n, 47005 Valladolid, Spain
Received 29 June 2003; accepted 1 July 2005

Abstract
This paper investigates the methodological convenience of a critical cognitive–pragmatic approach to
gender metaphors in Advertising English. We begin by reviewing recent research in cognitive linguistics,
pragmatics and critical discourse analysis (CDA) with regard to advertising metaphors and gender, then proceed
to characterize advertising gender metaphors as indirect cognitive–pragmatic devices used in Advertising
English to give rise to often covertly sexist communicated interpretations. Next, we present a description of
advertising gender metaphors, subtypes (cases of metaphorical gender, universal gender metaphors and cultural
gender metaphors) and cross-categorization in a case study of 1142 advertisements published in British
Cosmopolitan (years 1999 and 2000). Finally, we argue that a critical cognitive–pragmatic approach to
advertising gender metaphors is of most salience since it permits to (1) help the audience’s search for cognitive
efficiency, (2) unmask the advertiser’s rhetorical intentions to make certain non-neutral assumptions more
manifest to the target audiencewithout making public its intention to do so and (3) call for action on the part of the
addressee to overcome negative social consequences of its use in Advertising English.
# 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Advertising; English; Metaphor; Gender; Pragmatics; Cognitivism; Critical discourse analysis (CDA)

1. Introduction

Metaphors have traditionally been analyzed by cognitive linguistics, a subfield dedicated to

elucidating the interdependencies of thought and language, focusing mainly on the (ungendered)
role of metaphors in constructing cognition (Hines, 1999:145). Cognitive linguists contend that
metaphors are basic cognitive mechanisms, whereby one experiential domain is partially mapped

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +34 983 42 35 82; fax: +34 983 42 30 56.
E-mail address: pedro@tita.emp.uva.es (P.A. Fuertes-Olivera).

0378-2166/$ – see front matter # 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2005.07.002
 M. Velasco-Sacristán, P.A. Fuertes-Olivera / Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2006) 1982–2002 1983

onto a different experiential domain, and the second domain partially understood in terms of the
first one. The domain that is mapped is called the source or donor domain, and the domain onto
which it is mapped, is called the target or recipient domain. Both domains have to belong to
different superordinate domains. This is basically the cognitive concept of metaphor propounded
by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and Mark Turner (Johnson, 1987; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980;
Lakoff, 1987) as well as by Sweetser (1991), Gibbs (1994) and by other cognitive linguists that
have been investigating the field for the last decades (cf. Barcelona Sánchez, 1997:23). Only
recently have the language and gender research and cognitive linguistics been brought together to
analyze the gendered role of metaphors (Hines, 1999; Velasco Sacristán, 2003). This new
research takes as a starting point of departure the extensive research into the metaphorical
commodification and belittling of women (Lakoff, 1975; Schulz, 1975; Penelope, 1977) to
analyze the role of gendered metaphors.
Pragmatics has also made incursions into the context of both advertising metaphors and
gender research. On the one hand, there has been a great deal of work in linguistics over the last
two decades which claims that metaphors are best analyzed in the domain of pragmatics (Grice,
1975; Sperber and Wilson, 1986; Levinson, 1983; Blakemore, 1987, 1992; Wilson, 1990). These
studies share the assumption that there are one or more underlying principles which govern
communication and hence the understanding of metaphors (Tanaka, 1994:86). A Relevance
Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986) approach to the study of advertising metaphors is growing in
importance as evidenced by the contributions of, for example, Tanaka (1994) and Dı́az Pérez
(1999, 2000). These authors explain the advertising metaphor by treating it as a variety of ‘loose
talk’, namely ‘‘an utterance (that) can be used not only to represent a state of affairs in the world,
but also to represent another utterance it resembles in context’’ (Sperber and Wilson, 1986:228–
229). On the other hand, pragmatic studies on gender differences in hierarchical power relations
mostly highlight the fact that both men and women have begun to resist discursive meanings and
gender identities (Tannen, 1990; Fuertes Olivera, 1992; Talbot, 1992, 1995; Glass, 1993; Herring
et al., 1995, among others).
Critical discourse analysis (CDA), a developing field which grew out of systemic functional
linguistics, is ‘‘primarily interested and motivated by pressing social issues which it hopes to
better understand through discourse analysis’’ (Van Dijk, 1993:280). For Fairclough (1989:5),
‘critical’ is used ‘‘to show up connections which may be hidden from people—such as
connections between language, power and ideology as imposed by powerful elites via courts,
laws, media, etc.’’ (compare also Van Dijk, 1993; Johnson and Meinhof, 1997; Sunderland and
Litosseliti, 2002). This imposition can, nonetheless, be resisted by discourse participants
(Weedon, 1987; Horsman, 1990; Morrish, 2002; Sorea, 2002). Media recipients can, for instance,
change cognitive perceptions of media manifestations. Furthermore, this discourse-social
approach comes close to feminist and sociolinguistic studies’ interests. A critical (feminist)
discourse analysis aims ‘‘to uncover or make transparent those social processes and mechanisms
that can perpetuate injustice, inequality and manipulation and (sex) discrimination in both overt
and subtle, pernicious forms (Fairclough, 1989; Wodak, 1989), and those that promote and
reproduce androcentric views of life, including defining appropriate behaviour and desirable
attributes of women’’ (Sunderland and Litosseliti, 2002:21).
In this article, we claim that advertising gender metaphors provide a rich opportunity to consider
gender relations in advertising from a blend of cognitivism, pragmatics and CDA examinations.
These approaches are being used in this study, the aim of which is to investigate the methodological
convenience of a critical cognitive–pragmatic approach to gender metaphors in Advertising
English. The examples used are taken from consumer advertisements from British Cosmopolitan
1984 M. Velasco-Sacristán, P.A. Fuertes-Olivera / Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2006) 1982–2002

published between January 1999 and March 2000. For the material to be manageable, the paper
concentrates on those advertisements stored in the database ‘‘Anuncios 2002’’.1

2. Metaphors in Advertising English

From a cognitive and pragmatic point of view, the role of metaphors in Advertising English
can hardly be underestimated. On the one hand, in advertising the conceptualization of the
advertised item or service is usually expressed by either verbal or non-verbal instantiations of
conceptual metaphors that act as a ‘‘link between the domain of the advertised item and other
domains’’ (Ungerer, 2000:321). On the other hand, advertisers produce metaphorical utterances
to invite their audience to process the utterance. In doing so, the audience is made to see
resemblances between the promoted product or service and the object or property feature in the
metaphor. Moreover, the audience takes part in the responsibility for deriving further
assumptions about the object, which it associates with the product or service (Tanaka, 1994:90).
From a blend of cognitive linguistics and pragmatics, Forceville (1996) has anchored his
theoretical development within the tenets of the cognitive interactive view of metaphor (Black,
1962) and Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986). In essence, he claims that the
pragmatic component (i.e., the addresser, the addressee, the context, etc.) is a key element in any
metaphor that pictorial metaphors are typically irreversible, that they are not visual hybrids, and
that research into non-verbal or partly verbal is a conditio sine qua non for a further development
of cognitivist metaphor.
Taking Forceville’s cognitive–pragmatic account of advertising pictorial metaphors as a
starting point for reflection, we assume here three basic ideas in which advertising gender
metaphors are grounded: (i) metaphor is a mapping2 from a certain source domain onto a target
domain (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980); (ii) metaphor is a context-dependent communicative device
that is used in a concrete sociopolitical context like advertising as a way of communicating
difficult-to-grasp messages, or of dealing with socially loaded topics (Chilton and Schäffner,
2002); (iii) an advertising metaphor is a persuasive device that hides as well as reveals.
First, as Forceville argues, in advertising metaphors ‘‘one or more features from the domain of
the secondary subject (the source domain) is/are mapped on to the domain of the primary subject
(the target domain). This matching process involves the foregrounding, adoption or modification
of certain features in the primary subject domain’’ (1996:96) (see Plate 1).
In the ad FOR ‘‘L’Eau D’Issey Summer Fragrance’’, the following metaphor occurs: THE
ADVERTISED FRAGRANCE IS SEA WATER; here, the primary subject is ‘the advertised
fragrance’ and the secondary subject domain ‘sea water’. Some features from the source domain
‘sea water’ that could be mapped on to the target domain ‘the advertised fragrance’ can be
formulated as follows:

(1a) sea water is a liquid;

(2a) sea water is found on beaches that are associated with summer in people’s minds;
(3a) sea water is refreshing;
(4a) sea water is invigorating;
(5a) sea water is revitalizing.

1
This database stores the ads used by Velasco Sacristán (2003) in her Ph.D. thesis (see references).
2
A metaphorical mapping consists of a set of fixed conceptual correspondences, not a real-time algorithmic process by
means of which we start out at the source domain semantic structure and end up at the target domain one (Lakoff, 1993).
 M. Velasco-Sacristán, P.A. Fuertes-Olivera / Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2006) 1982–2002 1985

Plate 1.

After mapping on to the target domain, we get something like:

(1b) the advertised fragrance is a liquid;

(2b) the advertised fragrance is worn in summer when people go to beaches;
(3b) the advertised fragrance is refreshing;
(4b) the advertised fragrance is invigorating;
(5b) the advertised fragrance is revitalizing.

We can be sure of the last three projections because of the content of the slogan ‘‘Refreshing.
Invigorating. Revitalising’’, but we cannot be entirely sure of the first two mappings as we know
neither the addressee of the metaphor nor what he3 actually finds relevant enough to process, nor
in what order he will do so. He may begin with mappings ‘3b to 5b’. The reason for this
3
To avoid the clumsy use of ‘his/her’ for the addressee and recipient of metaphors, in line with Sperber and Wilson
(1986) and Forceville’s (1996) practice, the communicator of the metaphor will be taken, unless specified otherwise, to be
female, while the addressee will be considered to be male. As Forceville (1996:215) argues, ‘‘this solution elegantly pairs
positive discrimination to unambiguous referring conventions’’.
1986 M. Velasco-Sacristán, P.A. Fuertes-Olivera / Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2006) 1982–2002

indetermination is that interpretive resemblance is context-dependent (Tanaka, 1994:89).

Therefore, we must conclude that in the absence of a concrete context, it is difficult to assess
which projectable features all or most addressees would agree on. This takes us to the notion of
context.
Secondly, metaphor is a context-dependent communicative device that is used in a concrete
sociopolitical setting. As we have seen above (Plate 1), advertising metaphors convey an
indeterminate range of mappings or ‘implicatures’,4 as they are called in pragmatics. The
addresser intends to communicate a range of implicatures, rather than a fixed one and
communication follows when the addressee has recovered some of the implicatures within the
range (i.e., in Plate 1 mappings (3b–5b)). Hence, the relevance of a metaphor to the addressee is
established by recovering an array of implicatures. The range and strength of recovered
implicatures give rise to two broad types of metaphors. In the case of standardized metaphors, the
addressee is encouraged to recover a narrow range of strong implicatures. In the case of creative
metaphors, the addressee is encouraged to recover a wide range of weak implicatures. The
metaphor THE ADVERTISED FRAGRANCE IS SEA WATER in Plate 1 is a good illustration of
standardized metaphor insofar as it forces the addressee to recover at least three strong
implicatures (mappings (3b–5b)).
As we have seen, the addressee of the advertisement in Plate 1 is forced to recover certain
assumptions (3b–5b) at the expense of others (1b and 2b). This happens because the advertiser does
not publicize her informative intention. In contrast to what happens in ostensive communication,
the advertiser does not intend to make her intention mutually manifest to the addressee. She does
intend to affect the cognitive environment of his addressee but she avoids making her intention
mutually manifest. This type of communication is known as ‘covert communication’ (Tanaka,
1994). We argue here that the notion of ‘covert communication’, traditionally seen as compatible
with Relevance Theory, is important when accounting for the indirect covert nature of some
advertising metaphors and the way in which they are processed and interpreted by the addressee.
‘Covert communication’ is defined by Bencherif and Tanaka (1987) (quoted in Tanaka, 1994:4)
as ‘‘a case of communication where the intention of the speaker is to alter the cognitive environment
of the hearer, i.e., to make a set of assumptions more manifest to her,5 without making this intention
mutually manifest’’. In advertising, this strategy is used to overcome distrust and adverse reactions
on the part of the audience to various aspects of advertising, such as the use of sexist gender
metaphors, the traditional use of sexual imagery, and the exploitation of snobbery.
Advertisers often use gender metaphors to make certain assumptions more manifest to their
target audience without making public their intention to do so. By neglecting to publicize their
informative intention in this way, they cannot be held accountable for certain conceptual
implications that would otherwise harm their perceived impartiality. These metaphors are often
therefore a clear case of ‘covert communication’ as characterized by Tanaka. Hence, certain
advertising metaphors (i.e., gender metaphors or gendered metaphors) stress the interaction
between certain stimuli (sex, food, etc.)6 and human cognitive resources, but they also prove

4
Projectable features that all or most addressees would agree on could be said to be strong implicatures. More
idiosyncratically identified features would be weak implicatures (Forceville, 1996:97).
5
Tanaka assumes, as opposed to Sperber and Wilson (1986) and Forceville (1996), that the advertiser is male and the
addressee is female.
6
Sperber and Wilson (1986:151–155) argue that human beings are more susceptible to some cognitive phenomena
(i.e., food and sex) than to others, as cognition is designed to pick out relevant phenomena and process them in the most
efficient way. Generally, covert communication manipulates triggers to which the human mind is highly susceptible
(Tanaka, 1994:41, 54).
 M. Velasco-Sacristán, P.A. Fuertes-Olivera / Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2006) 1982–2002 1987

the undeniable influence exerted by social institutions, which are responsible for taboos that the
media tend to perpetuate or break down through repetition or other factors (e.g., metaphors) in
the human environment (cf. Crook, 2004:736). This illustrates the fact that advertising
metaphors take sociocultural contexts into consideration not only to convey abstract processes
(as they do in most overt types of communication) but also to conceptualize socially loaded
topics.
Thirdly, metaphors are not merely conceptual matters but also persuasive devices that are not
arbitrary but ideologically loaded (Fairclough, 1989; Hines, 1999; Velasco Sacristán, 2003).
Some metaphors hinge on non-neutral power to convey covert communication, which probably
works on an unconscious level in the discourse of advertising. A typical example of
ideologically bent metaphor is the so-called ‘‘advertising gender metaphor’’ (Velasco Sacristán,
2003).

3. Gender metaphors in Advertising English

Gender metaphors used in advertising are cognitive–pragmatic devices that exploit the
audience’s search for cognitive efficiency, often giving rise to covertly communicated sexist
interpretations. They may be defined as metaphors in which the conceptual mapping(s) that is
(are) projected from the source to the target domain may create and/or reflect some kind of
discrimination against men or women (Velasco Sacristán, 2003). The metaphor THE
ADVERTISED BRA IS A WOMAN (WHO CANNOT COOK) in Plate 2 is a very good
case in point.
The gender metaphor in this example is not sexist in itself (advertisements of lingerie
normally exhibit pictures of men or women); rather, it becomes sexist at a pragmatic level
due, in this case, to the weak implicatures addressees can infer from the slogan ‘‘I can’t cook.
So who cares?’’7 This metaphor acquires then a kind of social meaning, based on a
stereotypical assumption on women: ‘‘they are usually cooks, related to domestic settings/
kitchens’’. We can, therefore, conclude that advertising gender metaphors become sexist when
they help to maintain non gender-neutral, sexually based assumptions about men or women,
thereby showing the importance of advertising recipients’ interpretation and resistance to
them.
A sexist interpretation may seem irrelevant in some cases (i.e., advertisements of lingerie) and
obviously unacceptable in any case, so the addressee may believe that the advertiser cannot have
intended it. But, on the other hand, it is hard to imagine a sexist interpretation arising from such
an advertising metaphor as being anything but deliberate. At some point, the addressee may find
aspects (i.e., stereotypical gender relations) of the ad to be inconsistent in terms of his
schematically determined expectations. This could, in turn, prompt the audience to realign their
expectations accordingly, making them decide, perhaps at a subconscious level, that a ‘‘non-
sexist’’ ideology would be more appropriate.
In the discourse of Advertising English, there are three different types of gender metaphors:
‘cases of metaphorical gender’, ‘universal gender metaphors’, and ‘cultural gender metaphors’.
These types, rather than appearing in isolation in single ads, very often co-occur, giving rise to a
complex network of gender relations within many advertisements.

7
The same ad but without this slogan would probably not be interpreted as ‘‘sexist’’ by addressees. Many ads use
images of men or women to promote male or female lingerie.
1988 M. Velasco-Sacristán, P.A. Fuertes-Olivera / Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2006) 1982–2002

Plate 2.

3.1. Cases of metaphorical gender

In English, instances of metaphorical gender occur when an inanimate object is the

grammatical subject of a verbal or mental process. This can be done either verbally8 (but only in
languages with a semantic gender), pictorially (in any language), or in a hybrid fashion (verbo-
pictorially or pictorio-verbally).
English grammars state that the choice between ‘he’, ‘she’, and ‘it’ is determined semantically
‘‘primarily by the properties of the referent and secondarily, to a very limited extent, by the
speaker’s attitude to the referent’’ (Huddleston, 1984:289). The latter possibility is considered an
irregular feature of the English semantic gender system due to metaphorization (Baron, 1971). In
English, sailors often refer to ‘ships’ as ‘she’. This usage of the pronoun ‘she’ represents an

8
This concrete instantiation of the metaphorical gender in advertising English has traditionally been considered an
illustration of Halliday’s grammatical metaphor (Talbot, 1992). Yet, in our view, it can be a more complex type of
metaphor as it often goes beyond the limits of grammar, being reinforced in the discourse of advertising by visuals, as in
Plate 3.
 M. Velasco-Sacristán, P.A. Fuertes-Olivera / Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2006) 1982–2002 1989

affectionate use of the concept to convey associate, rather than definitional attributes of
womanhood, such as companionship, maternal love, etc., but also demonstrates a high degree of
incongruence (cf. Veale, 1999:Introduction, p. 17 of 18).
Advertisers extend the metaphorical gender to develop the so-called theory of ‘‘the
metaphorical personification of the commodity’’ (Sánchez Corral, 1991, 1997) by means of
which the nonhuman entity of a commodity is understood in terms of a person (consumer) and the
different human features, motivations and activities related to this person. This is indeed a typical
example of the ontological metaphor ITEMS TO SELL ARE PEOPLE (Kövecses, 2002:59) that
evokes in the reader the same attitudes and feelings that they have in connection with a person,
the consumer. In this case, the consumer is often constrained by a PART FOR WHOLE
metonymy (i.e., SEX FOR PERSON) that is related to the commodity by yet another metonymic
experience (i.e., getting commodities as a result of buying them as consumers). Usually, the
verbal pronouns and/or the context provide us with sufficient clues to decide which construal is
appropriate. In the following advertisement for ‘‘Eva Lingerie’’ (Plate 3) we can see the metaphor
THE ADVERTISED LINGERIE (COMMODITY) IS A WOMAN (CONSUMER).

Plate 3.
1990 M. Velasco-Sacristán, P.A. Fuertes-Olivera / Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2006) 1982–2002

Plate 4.

This ad promotes ‘‘a collection of luxury lingerie with exquisite lace detailing and
microfibre’’. For this reason, it features a sexy young woman wearing the product advertised and
the slogan ‘‘Exquisite . . . isn’t she?’’ The use of ‘‘she’’ here seems to point to the lingerie to
convey the associate attribute of ‘‘womanhood’’ (e.g., sexiness, etc.).
So far, we have illustrated the use of a verbopictorial instantiation of the metaphorical gender
in Advertising English. Let us now turn to an instantiation of the following pictorial case of
metaphorical gender: THE ADVERTISED FRAGRANCE IS A WOMAN (Plate 4).
As we can see, the pictorial personification of commodities appears to highlight
metonymically,9 certain parts of men’s or women’s bodies (i.e., waists, breasts, etc.), thus
somehow, reducing consumers to their bodies (depersonification).
In summary, advertisers use cases of metaphorical gender to develop the so-called
‘‘metaphorical personification of the commodity’’ (Sánchez Corral, 1991, 1997). In doing so they
develop a conceptual metaphor: A COMMODITY IS A CONSUMER (MAN/WOMAN) that
adds value to the advertised commodity by transferring to it human attributes and behavioral
actions (i.e., name—‘brand name’, etc.). On the other hand, pictorial instantiations of the
metaphorical gender tend to play metonymically on certain parts of consumer’s bodies, thus
somehow reducing them to their body.

9
In metaphor, one entity is understood in terms of the other, whereas in a metonymy, one entity in a schema stands for
another entity in the same schema, or for the schema as a whole (conversely, the schema as a whole may also stand for an
entity within the schema)’’ (Ruı́z de Mendoza, 1997:282).
 M. Velasco-Sacristán, P.A. Fuertes-Olivera / Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2006) 1982–2002 1991

3.2. Universal gender metaphors

Metaphorical mappings may either be universal or language independent; the latter is the case
if they involve semantic domains like embodied experiences that are independent of the
conceptual system of one language (Gibbs, 1996) and present in unrelated languages. Lakoff
(1987:278) called such unmarked domains ‘‘preconceptual’’ as opposed to culturally marked
domains (cf. Neumann, 2001:124).
Preconceptual domains include basic domains that do not presuppose other domains for their
conceptualization (i.e., space, time, taste, temperature, etc.) (Langacker, 1987) as well as image-
schemas that are prelinguistic cognitive structures, many of which acquired from the earliest
experiences upon which our complete cognitive development is based (Johnson, 1987). We have,
among others, image-schemas of a bounded space (or container), a path, contact, and human
orientations (up–down, front–back, center–periphery).
Image schemas are extremely productive in terms of social structuration. They, therefore, play
a very important role in our understanding of the power of discourse and social institutions.
Indeed, the kinesthetic image schemas of ‘compulsion’ (a force which travels along a trajectory at
a certain speed and moves or carries an object or person along in its path), of ‘blockage’ (a force
vector encountering a barrier and then taking any number of possible directions) and of
‘containment’ (an elaboration of the blockage schema wherein the blockage is continuous so as to
separate ‘‘inside’’ from ‘‘outside’’) (Johnson, 1987) lie at the root of our everyday conception of
power. Persuasive discourses are, therefore, awash with metaphors sustained in image-schemas.10
In advertising, spatial metaphors based on image schemas are commonly used to convey
power and to construct gendered spaces. In the 70s and 80s, femininity and feminine spaces were
constructed through submission with a decrease in the size of territory controlled. Nowadays,
there have been changes in the level of content (i.e., more men in kitchens or holding babies,
more women in business suits) while image schemas have remained largely unchanged (Umiker-
Sebeok, 1996). This seems to prove that, largely due to our unawareness, the use of image
schemas in advertising is more difficult to alter than content (Umiker-Sebeok, 1996).
Furthermore, in the discourse of advertising, metaphors sustained in image schemas give rise
to correlated non-spatial inferences that help to construct asymmetrical relations on the basis of
the axiological value that underlies image schemas (Krzeszowski, 1990, 1993). In the schema
‘up–down’, for instance, ‘up’ is related to power, control, goodness and ‘down’ to powerlessness,
submission, badness (cf. Krzeszowski, 1990, 1993; Cortés de los Rı́os, 2001). But positive–
negative evaluation is not limited to the spatial orientation ‘‘up–down’’. It has been pointed out
that various spatial image schemas are bipolar and bivalent. Thus, ‘‘whole’’, ‘‘center’’, ‘‘link’’,
‘‘balance’’, ‘‘in’’, ‘‘goal’’, ‘‘front’’ are mostly regarded as positive while their opposites, ‘‘not
whole’’, ‘‘periphery’’, ‘‘no link’’, ‘‘imbalance’’, ‘‘out’’, ‘‘no goal’’ and ‘‘back’’ are negative
(Kövecses, 2002:35).
In advertising, metaphors based on different image schemas are often used to display men/
women as powerful people (at the front of the page, usually on the right hand side, etc.) triggering
the spatial discrimination of men or women. Universal gender metaphors may be defined as those
metaphors based on kinesthetic image schemas, especially those of compulsion, blockage and
containment, used to locate men or women in the sociocultural, political, and economic settings,

10
The use of spatial metaphors that discriminate against race has been analyzed by El Refaie (2001), particularly the
binary schemas of ‘here–there’/‘front–back’ and ‘first/second’. Pavlenko and Blackledge (2004), on the other hand, have
studied the ‘in/out’ schema in those metaphors used in the negotiation of identities in multilingual contexts.
1992 M. Velasco-Sacristán, P.A. Fuertes-Olivera / Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2006) 1982–2002

Plate 5.

hence discriminating against one sex or the other (Velasco Sacristán, 2003). They are, all in all,
useful to polarize the world (as portrayed in the ad) as ‘‘the male versus the female’’.
A typical example of this type of gender metaphor in advertising is A MAN/WOMAN IS A
PRIMARY PERSON mostly based on the binary schemas of ‘up–down’, ‘front–back’, ‘first–
second’, and ‘big–small’. The ad for ‘‘ZM magazine’’ (Plate 5) contains a typical manifestation
of one case of the above conceptual metaphor: A MAN IS A PRIMARY PERSON.
This double-page ad reserves the left page for the headline ‘‘you deserve better sex’’ and the right
page for a representation of the advertised magazine’s front page together with the slogan ‘‘Give
him ZM. Feel him better’’. The picture of the left page portrays a young man and a young sexy
woman. The man, who is placed in the front is smiling and his features are perfectly visible. The
woman, who is at the back, sitting with her legs crossed and her features blurred, is only wearing an
unbuttoned shirt and black lingerie. This naturalness of the ‘‘first/front’’ to ‘‘second/behind’’
mapping follows the same general cognitive constraints previously introduced with respect to the
use of kinesthetic image schemas to construct powered and gendered spaces in advertising.
All in all, universal gender metaphors used in advertising are denigratory insofar as they are
based on image schemas that are largely (and probably ‘‘covertly’’) beyond our awareness, that
are more difficult to alter than other content-based denigratory devices, and that are reinforced by
the axiological value typically attached to image schemas. The three directional binary levels of
‘right–left’, ‘above–below’, and ‘front–behind’ seems to be of most salience in the metaphorical
conceptualization of universal gender metaphors in advertising (cf. Umiker-Sebeok, 1996;
Velasco Sacristán, 2003).

3.3. Cultural gender metaphors

One of the problems to do with the idea that conceptual metaphors are determined by our
preconceptual experiences is that the use of discriminatory metaphors might then be explained—
and perhaps even excused—by our physical limitations. This is the reason why some authors
have turned away from a search for universal metaphors and have instead begun to stress the
cultural dimension of metaphor (Quinn, 1991). Research, for instance, into xenophobic
 M. Velasco-Sacristán, P.A. Fuertes-Olivera / Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2006) 1982–2002 1993

discourses in various contexts has also revealed interesting differences regarding which
metaphors are most commonly used and what aspects of these metaphors are stressed or played
down (El Refaie, 2001:353).
Cultural metaphors are those that reflect sociopolitical values not necessarily present in all
cultures. Culture comprises not only manifestations of human intellectual activities such as arts
and philosophy, but also beliefs and ways of life, which form cultural models defined by Holland
and Quinn as ‘‘presupposed, taken-for granted models of the world that are widely shared by the
members of a society and that play an enormous role in their understanding of that to their
behavior in it’’ (cited in Dodd, 2002:519). Since metaphors create a link between cognitive
models and cultures, we can define cultural gender metaphors as ‘‘those metaphors that rest on
asymmetrical cultural practices, based on gender stereotypes’’,11 that result in discrimination
against men or women (Velasco Sacristán, 2003).
In general terms, cultural gender metaphors tend to understand human beings in terms of
objects, animals or stereotypical human features. Metaphors of this type having to do with
attributes which apply to humans, animals, plants, complex objects and natural physical things
are explained in terms of the so-called ‘great chain metaphor’ (Lakoff and Turner, 1989:170ff).
The ‘great chain metaphor’, as proposed by Lakoff and Turner, basically consists of a very
abstract metaphor, THE GENERIC IS SPECIFIC, whose mappings are guided or motivated by
two entrenched cultural models, namely ‘the basic chain of being’ and ‘the nature of things’
(which are themselves combined into ‘the extended great chain’) and by the pragmatic maxim of
quantity. There is no space here for a detailed exposition of each of these ingredients, but ‘the
great chain metaphor’ explains a large number of mappings in which lower-order forms of being
and their attributes can be mapped to higher forms of being, and their usual behavior or
functioning is mapped onto higher order forms of being, while their attributes and behavior or
their functioning: containers are mapped onto human bodies and people, and so on (Barcelona
Sánchez, 1997:36).
We have so far characterized cultural gender metaphors as those sustained by gender
stereotypes rooted in our cultural traditions. Their discriminatory character stems from the
denigratory value of gender stereotypes. Fig. 1 shows the scale of sexist denigration of gender
stereotypes that underlies the above described ‘great chain metaphor’.
In Advertising English, cultural gender metaphors discriminate when men or women are
understood in terms of the lower elements described in the basic chain of being (i.e., animals and
objects) or when men or women, although seen as human beings, are defined by stereotypical
denigratory features. Regarding low to high discrimination, we find the following three subtypes
of cultural gender metaphors: A MAN/WOMAN IS A PERSON (WITH STEREOTYPICAL
FEATURES); A MAN/WOMAN IS AN ANIMAL (WITH STEREOTYPICAL FEATURES)
and A MAN/WOMAN IS AN OBJECT (WITH STEREOTYPICAL FEATURES). The third
subtype is indeed a metonymy rather than a metaphor. In Advertising English, a typical case of
this subtype of cultural gender metaphor is the metaphor A MAN/WOMAN IS A SEXUAL
OBJECT, which usually equates the product or service promoted with a sexual entity, usually
categorized as food12 or an object that resembles the male or female sexual organs (i.e., a

11
A gender stereotype is ‘‘a generalised and relatively fixed image of a person or persons belonging to a particular
group. This is formed by isolating or exaggerating certain features—physical, mental, cultural or occupational, personal
and so on—which seem to characterise the group’’ (Pauwels, 1998:97).
12
In many cultures, sexy women are classed as food and ‘to eat’ is used as a euphemism for ‘to copulate’ (Pauwels,
1998).
1994 M. Velasco-Sacristán, P.A. Fuertes-Olivera / Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2006) 1982–2002

Fig. 1. Scale of sexist denigration of gender stereotypes. Source: Velasco Sacristán et al. (2005).

container, an item with a phallic shape, etc.). The advertisements for ‘‘Aubade’’ contain
examples of one of the above conceptual metaphors A WOMAN IS A SEXUAL OBJECT (Plates
6 and 7).
The advertisements show a faceless nude young woman, only wearing the lingerie
advertised. In both ads, the lack of faces and the close-ups of the lingerie advertised seem to
suggest the metonymic reduction of women to their underwear, thus probably emphasizing
their need to enhance their natural look with seducing lingerie. Moreover, the fact that the
lingerie advertised is useful, not only in its literal sense to dress a woman, but to enhance her
sexual performance, also appears to introduce discrimination against men. As suggested by
both ads, men become objects of passive consumption when women wear sexy lingerie. They
can then be caught, like fish, in a woman’s net (the ‘G-string’) and helped to obtain a full
erection; this likewise apparently suggests that they need extra help there.
In short, cultural gender metaphors hinge upon stereotypical relations to create asymmetric
gender relations in different conceptual metaphors (mostly instances of ‘the great chain
metaphor’) that involve stereotypical denigratory references to human beings, animals, or
objects. The limiting and demeaning stereotypes sustaining these metaphors result in non-
gender-neutral metaphors that discriminate against one sex or the other.

3.4. Cross-categorization of advertising gender metaphors

The above described gender metaphors hardly ever appear in isolation in Advertising English.
Very often, metaphorical gender instances and universal gender metaphors take on a stereotypical
background and some cultural gender metaphors contain discriminatory metaphorical image
 M. Velasco-Sacristán, P.A. Fuertes-Olivera / Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2006) 1982–2002 1995

Plate 6.

schemas. This points to a cross-categorization of gender metaphors in Advertising English. Let

us examine the examples13 we have provided so far to illustrate the presence of gender metaphors
in our sample to see if there are instances of such cross-categorization.
In the metaphor THE ADVERTISED FRAGRANCE IS A WOMAN (Plate 4), characterized
as an example of metaphorical gender in section 3.1, the image of the bottle of fragrance seems to
suggest the following cultural metaphor: THE ADVERTISED FRAGRANCE IS A WOMAN
WHO IS A SEX SYMBOL. Sex symbols are usually supposed to have some measures that are

13
The examples of gender metaphors shown in this paper portray only discrimination against women. We have found a
few cases of discrimination against men (i.e., 13.01% of the gender metaphors), but in our sample the gender metaphors
that discriminate against women outnumber those that discriminate against men. In spite of the magazine reputation for
being permissive or defending a sexual liberation ideology (Winship, 1987:10) it seems that there is still conservatism in
its advertising. Many of its ads still reinforce feminine and housewife stereotypes. Men have also come to the fore,
especially with regard to the idea that they have to look good and fit.
1996 M. Velasco-Sacristán, P.A. Fuertes-Olivera / Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2006) 1982–2002

Plate 7.

culturally taken as a standard in beauty contests, etc. These measures highlight middle-sized
breasts and hips, along with a narrow waist.14
The metaphor A MAN IS A PRIMARY PERSON (Plate 5), characterized as a universal
gender metaphor in section 3.2, gives us the impression that women are not only secondary to
men, but also ‘‘sexual objects’’, as inferred from the headline ‘‘You deserve better sex’’, thus
giving rise to a possibly cross-culturalized15 metaphor: A MAN IS A PRIMARY PERSON WHO
IS OVER WOMEN/SEXUAL OBJECTS.
The metaphor A WOMAN IS A SEXUAL OBJECT (Plates 6 and 7) (see section 3.3),
characterized as a cultural gender metaphor, presents curvilinear female postures; curves are
considered to be kinesthetic image schemas that are used to show appeasement as opposed to
more dominant male angular postures (cf. Umiker-Sebeok, 1996). This seems to give rise to the

14
Jean Paul Gaultier is said to have been inspired by the pop singer Madonna as a cultural sex symbol for the design of
the bottle of his fragrance.
15
A cross-culturalized metaphor is a universal metaphor that is culturally adopted and adapted in a concrete culture
(Velasco Sacristán, 2003).
 M. Velasco-Sacristán, P.A. Fuertes-Olivera / Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2006) 1982–2002 1997

following hybrid gender metaphor: A WOMAN IS A SEXUAL OBJECT WHICH IS

APPEASED BY MEN.
The very existence of these examples of hybrid types of gender metaphors and the difficulty
to find pure examples of each single type of gender metaphor outline a complex network of
gender representations in the metaphors of Advertising English. In our view, both pure and
hybrid types of advertising gender metaphors and their often covert underlying sexist
denigration can be best analyzed by means of a critical cognitive–pragmatic approach, as we
will illustrate next.

4. Towards a critical cognitive–pragmatic approach to advertising gender metaphors

Forceville’s (1996) cognitive–pragmatic approach to pictorial metaphors in advertising can be

applied, enriched with a critical account, to the analysis of gender metaphors in Advertising
English.
The first step in our use of Forceville’s model is the cognitive account of metaphor. In our case
the cognitive analysis of an advertising gender metaphor should show an awareness that a
metaphor has two distinctive terms, one being the primary subject or tenor, and the other the
secondary subject or vehicle; the two are usually not reversible. Here, one should also show
the identification of their labeling as primary and secondary subject, respectively, and the
identification of the transfer or mapping of features from secondary subject on to primary subject
(cf. Forceville, 1996:65). Black’s (1962) interaction theory meets the requirements of these
criteria insofar as it yields three crucial questions to be asked of anything purporting to be a
metaphor: (1) what are the two terms of the metaphor, and how do we know? (2) Which of the two
terms of the metaphor is the primary subject, and how do we know? (3) Which features are
projected from the domain of the secondary subject upon the domain of the primary subject, and
how do we decide on these features? In answering these three questions, various contextual levels
must be taken into account. Moreover, it is important to realize who the communicator of the
metaphor is and who is the addressee.
The pragmatic principle of relevance, as defined by Sperber and Wilson (1986), plays also a
vital role in assessing the interpretation of the metaphor (Forceville, 1996). Sperber and Wilson
(1986:158) define relevance as a combined function of effect and effort. Relevance increases to
the extent that the information conveyed by the communicator has an impact on the cognitive
environment of the addressee, that is, causes the addressee to modify his views of or thought
about aspects of the world by adopting, rejecting, strengthening, or weakening certain
assumptions. Relevance is, thus, always a result of the interaction between a stimulus and the
cognitive environment of the addressee. To obtain relevance, a stimulus processed in a cognitive
environment (context) should have a contextual effect. Relevance, then, decreases to the extent
that the effort needed to interpret the stimulus is greater (cf. Forceville, 1996:87–88). Covert
communication, as opposed to ostensive communication, does not bear a guarantee of optimal
relevance. According to Sperber and Wilson (1986:158), an utterance is optimally relevant only
if it achieves enough effects to be worthy of the hearer’s non-gratuitous effort to achieve an effect.
In addition, this shows an awareness of the importance of pragmatics in a cognitive account of
metaphor: ‘‘metaphorical meaning cannot be adequately discussed without resorting to
metaphorical use’’ (Forceville, 1996:4).
The analysis of gender metaphors used in advertising would then also involve an
interpretation dimension. At this stage, it is useful to show how the interaction theory as applied
to advertising gender metaphors can be enriched by Sperber and Wilson’s insights. The most
1998 M. Velasco-Sacristán, P.A. Fuertes-Olivera / Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2006) 1982–2002

valuable account Relevance Theory offers for a model of advertising gender metaphors bears first
on the issue of the identities of the communicator/addresee(s) in an advertising message and
second, on the distinction between strongly and weakly communicated aspects of metaphor
(Forceville, 1996:84). These two elements converge in the crucial claim that relevance is always
relevance to an individual (Forceville, 1996:107). To start with, we will have to know who is
communicating a gender metaphor and who is the addressee of that metaphor. We will also have
to bear in mind that metaphors as communicative devices rely for their effectiveness on both
explicatures (i.e., explicitly communicated assumptions) and on inferred implicatures (i.e.,
implicitly communicated assumptions) (Sperber and Wilson, 1986:182). Such implicatures can
be strong or weak. Weak implicatures are less widely shared, less immediate, ambiguous,
perhaps more idiosyncratic whereas strong implicatures are widely shared, immediate, reliable
and less ambiguous (cf. Sperber and Wilson, 1986:193–202).
Let us suppose, for argument’s sake, that the message is addressed by the advertiser of
‘‘Eva Lingerie’’ (Plate 3) who is running a print campaign of ads in British Cosmopolitan.
This communicator does not know the audience of this women’s magazine but can reasonably
expect an interest in, and possibly some knowledge of it on the part of the addressees. Let us
further assume that both communicator and addressee share a linguistic and cultural
background. The addressee, in Sperber and Wilson’s model, trusts the communicator to have
aimed at optimal relevance. The metaphor in question being no more than a stimulus that
gives the addressee some degree of access to the thoughts of the communicator, the
addressee’s search for the first interpretation consistent with the principle of relevance
involves, we must assume, an assessment that there is a considerable ‘gap’ between thought
and utterance16 on the part of the communicator (positive claims for the product/denigration
of women), and hence that the utterance is not a literal, but in this case, a metaphorical
one.
Here, let us return to Black’s model. In THE ADVERTISED LINGERIE IS A WOMAN the
primary subject is ‘the advertised lingerie’, the secondary subject is ‘a woman’.17 Some features
occurring in the source domain ‘a woman’ that could be mapped on to the target domain ‘the
advertised lingerie’ can be formulated as follows:
(1a) ‘the advertised lingerie is exquisite’;
(2a) ‘the advertised lingerie is tempting’;
(3a) ‘the advertised lingerie is a luxury’.

After mapping on to the target domain, we get something like:

(1b) ‘a woman is exquisite’;

(2b) ‘a woman is a temptress’;
(3b) ‘a woman is a luxury’.

16
A point arising in Sperber and Wilson’s (1986:232) discussion of metaphor is that of the ‘gap’ between thought and
language. In their view, a communicator’s utterance can vary in the degree to which it resembles her thought. The greater
the ‘gap’ between the two, the less literal the utterance. Optimal relevance will sometimes be achieved by a high degree of
literalness, sometimes by a low degree of literalness (cf. Forceville, 1996:95).
17
Concerning primary and secondary subject identification, we have borne in mind that in advertising, the primary
subject is usually the commodity (e.g., product/service) itself or something related to it (cf. Forceville, 1996:121;
Ungerer, 2000:332) and the secondary subject is a more or less structured domain of human experience that represents the
desired quality (Ungerer, 2000:325).
 M. Velasco-Sacristán, P.A. Fuertes-Olivera / Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2006) 1982–2002 1999

Different addressees will to some extent vary18 in deciding which features are to be projected,
and may come up with yet others. Nevertheless, we would venture that variants (1b) and (2b) are
more strongly implicated than any of the other four. But whether this is correct or not, the
interpretation of the metaphor is always subject to debate, and can never be exhaustively
paraphrased (cf. Forceville 1996:97). Inasmuch as the assumptions communicated (here, the
features mapped from source on to target domain) are weak, this means that the responsibility for
deriving them lies with the addressee rather than with the communicator.
In short, in the metaphor THE ADVERTISED BRA IS A WOMAN the addressee then will
probably tend to assume that the advertiser has wanted to convey a negative, socially
unacceptable attitude concerning women, since in our cultural background ‘women as
temptresses and sexually desirable objects’ have rather negative discriminatory connotations.
The investigation of this example, then, shows that Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory is
completely commensurate with Black’s interaction theory of metaphor.
The third dimension of a critical cognitive–pragmatic approach to advertising gender
metaphors concerns the social effects of gender metaphors in advertising English discourse. The
critical stage of the metaphor analysis has to do with metaphor as a sociocultural practice that
organizes interpersonal relations between discourse participants within particular contexts. They
often have an underlying system of evaluation that intends to influence opinions, thus creating the
ideological justification for some social practice (i.e., capitalism, hedonism, etc.). The critical
stage is, all in all, an essential component of gaining freedom from the imposition of the
metaphors on others. As Charteris-Black (2004:251) argues, ‘‘metaphor is a way of creating
cognitive and affecting meaning, by changing the metaphor we may change the way that we think
and feel about something’’. This seems to be, therefore, a crucial stage, as here one expects to see
oppositional action on the part of the addressee, something which is desirable and needed in order
to subvert the use of those advertising gender metaphors that are sexist. In the above example,
once addressees of British Cosmopolitan realize that the metaphor THE ADVERTISED BRA IS
A WOMAN is sexist (‘‘women are seen as temptresses and probably as sexual objects for men’s
consumption’’), they are well advised to be active in advertising communication and report the
discriminatory nature of the ad to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). This institution is
in charge of policing the rules laid down in the British advertising codes, including those that aim
at preserving the gender neutral content of advertisements.

5. Conclusion

Advertising gender metaphors are indirect cognitive pragmatic devices that, in exploiting the
audience’s search for cognitive efficiency, often give rise to covertly communicated sexist
interpretations. They may be characterized as metaphors in which the conceptual mapping(s) that
is (are) projected from the source to the target domain may create and/or reflect some kind of
discrimination against men or women. In the discourse of Advertising English, there are three
types of gender metaphors: cases of metaphorical gender, universal gender metaphors, and
cultural gender metaphors. These hardly ever appear in isolation, thus presenting a complex
network of gender representation in advertising English.
These metaphors and their often covertly underlying sexist denigration are best analyzed in
terms of a critical cognitive–pragmatic approach. The cognitive account can help the audience’s

18
An opinion poll would be needed in order to check the interpretation of a sizeable group of readers rather than
individual interpretations.
2000 M. Velasco-Sacristán, P.A. Fuertes-Olivera / Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2006) 1982–2002

search for cognitive efficiency. The pragmatic approach permits to unmask the advertiser’s
rhetorical intentions, so as to make certain non-neutral assumptions more manifest to the target
audience without making public her intention to do so. Finally, the critical examination calls for
action on the part of the addressee of sexist ads19 to overcome the negative social consequences of
the use of gender metaphors in Advertising English.

Acknowledgments

Preparation for this research was partly supported by a grant from the Spanish Government
(Department of Asuntos Sociales; reference ‘‘Instituto de la Mujer’’ I+D+I 27/01). We are
grateful to two anonymous reviewers and to the editor for their comments on two earlier versions
of this article.

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Marisol Velasco Sacristán holds a PhD from the University of Valladolid, where she teaches Applied Linguistics,
particularly ESP. Her main research interest includes women’s studies, sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics and
specialized communication. Her papers in these areas have appeared in international and national journals such as
Journal of Pragmatics, International Journal of Lexicography, Atlantis, and Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses. She
has recently published her PhD dissertation, which deals with Advertising English, metaphor and gender.

Pedro A. Fuertes Olivera holds a PhD from the University of Valladolid, where he teaches Applied Linguistics,
particularly ESP. His main research interest includes women’s studies, cognitive linguistics, sociolinguistics and
specialized communication. His papers in these areas have appeared in leading journals such as Journal of Pragmatics,
International Journal of Lexicography, TARGET, META, Terminology, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, and
English for Specific Purposes. He is also the author of Mujer, lenguaje y Sociedad. Los estereotipos de género en inglés y
en español (Alcalá de Henares, Ayto, 1992), and Lexicologı́a y variación en la Lengua Inglesa. Estudio de los nombres,
verbos y adjetivos informales del ‘Cobuild’ (Universidad de Valladolid, 2001).