ABSTRACT
In Chapter 9, Theory of Visual Rhetoric, Sonja Foss calls attention to the benefits of visual communication studies for the extension and further development of rhetorical theory. Because visual images play an increasingly important role in all types of discourse and argumentation, the study of visual rhetoric in contemporary culture should assume a more central role in rhetorical scholarship than has traditionally been the case. This chapter is intended to contribute to that effort by focusing on the communicative functions of a particular class of nonlinguistic symbol, the visual metaphor. I examine the features of visual metaphors in a sample of advertisements taken from selected popular magazines. Thus, this study is an example of what Foss has characterized as “inductive exploration of the visual to generate the rhetorical.”
