The articles presents an ongoing study of visual metaphors in terms of cognitive approach. Visual metaphor is viewed by the authors as a cognitive tool that structures the perception of the world. The perception of visual metaphors is analysed by means of multimodal transcription that allows to decipher the semiotic codes that produce the meaning. Multimodal transcript is made applying the system of 14 semiotic codes represented by verbal and non-verbal elements of the visual metaphor. The metaphors are divided into motionless and motion ones depending on the type of channel that is engaged for perceiving and processing the information. Depending on the type of the visual metaphor different semiotic codes are transcribed in the structure of the metaphor.

Modern transportation and communication technology, the Internet, have put people closer together, made the world a tiny place indeed, thus making interaction and cooperation between countries faster and ever more consistent. Growing numbers of interpersonal connections on the global scale often level traditions and cultures. Development of mass culture is making people, to some extent, similar. The urge to stabilise one’s internal structures of personality had become a natural reaction to these processes, that is why creating positive cultural image is now a pressing need for many. Tourism as a type of cross-cultural communication is one of the powerful stimuli for that need as well as the source of positive perception of one’s environment. In this article we will address the following issues: text rhetoric of educational and tourist brochures as well as their discourse, connected by genre of educational tourism brochure. We argue that it is possible to build and enhance the positive image of a region by means of linguistics, i.e., using a particular method of discourse – language of tourism – and various techniques that we point out when we describe specific features of discourse of education and discourse of tourism.