Metaphors in Stand Up 2 Cancer animations

Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) claims that human beings systematically understand, and communicate about, abstract and/or complex phenomena metaphorically in terms of concrete, that is, sensorily perceived phenomena (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Illnesses such as cancer constitute one category of such complex phenomena. While the past decades have witnessed a growing number of studies that examine verbal manifestations of metaphors pertaining to cancer, visual and multimodal expressions of metaphors of the target domain cancer is source domain x type have hitherto been virtually unexplored. This paper examines a corpus of 27 short animations supported by the “Stand Up 2 Cancer” charity.