This study is a result of literature review of visual metaphors in the fields of linguistics and advertising. The collected fifty papers came from CNKI. It provided an overview of previous literature, in terms of multi-modal studies of visual metaphor in advertising, the typologies of visual rhetoric and the verbalization of visual metaphor. Based on the identified research gaps, this study proposed suggestions for future research to enrich the theoretical framework of visual metaphor. The review found that the study of visual metaphors remain insufficient in three aspects. Firstly, the relevant studies are mostly in the field of marketing, and lack of extension in linguistics. Secondly, most studies concerned about the cognitive effects of visual metaphor in advertising, but the cognitive processing form of visual metaphor was less focused. Furthermore, although some studies have proved that verbalization is necessary for the comprehension of visual metaphors, there is still no clear conclusion regarding the specific verbalization forms of different types of visual metaphors. Specifically, three syntactic structures have been hypothetically proposed for fusion-structured visual metaphors, as “A is like B, A is B, A with B”, but no empirical evidence suggests which is the most effective in conceptual representation of fusion-structured visual metaphors in advertising. Through the analysis of the differences between these syntactic structures, the author proposed that the verbalization form “A is B” should be the most effective in representing fusion-structured visual metaphors in the context of advertising for its basic metaphorical structure, easily comprehensible form and strong transformational effect.

Although investigating metaphors in advertising is gaining in popularity, there are still certain unresolved arguments, such as the interaction between elements of different modalities. This study, composed of three behavioral experiments, aims to identify how verbal anchoring (literal anchoring, metaphor anchoring and unrelated anchoring) influences the processing of pictorial metaphors in advertising, by observing the cognitive and affective indicators, advertising comprehension and advertising likeability. The results showed 1) that metaphors in pictorial modality were recognized more quickly than those in verbal modality, 2) that verbal anchoring facilitated participants ’ comprehending and appreciating of pictorial metaphors and 3) that literally-anchored metaphors with a moderate level of novelty yielded the most favorable cognitive responses. The study not only enriches the existing theoretical framework of multimodal metaphors in advertising, but also proposes an optimal match between pictorial metaphors and verbal elements, for advertisers and manufacturers to design effective multimodal advertisements.