Happiness is drinking beer: A cross-cultural analysis of multimodal metaphors in American and Ukrainian commercials

This paper examines multimodal conceptual metaphors in a corpus of 32 American and Ukrainian beer commercials. The dominant metaphor in both cultures is HAPPINESS IS DRINKING BEER, with a secondary metaphor BEER IS A PERSON. The Ukrainian commercials exhibit a third metaphor that appears in a very subtle way in the American commercials: LOVE FOR THE MOTHERLAND IS DRINKING BEER. The analysis reveals cross-cultural variation in the mappings and entailments of the metaphors. We argue that this variation is not just a matter of divergent advertising strategies but is a manifestation of differences in the conceptual understandings of happiness, beer drinking, friendship, and patriotism in both cultures.