Multimodality In Advertising-with Particular Emphasis On Metaphor

With the rapid development of the global economy, advertising has become an important way of business communication in modern society. It plays an increasingly significant role in people's daily life and communication. Therefore, a lot of rhetorical means are used in advertising, so advertising research has become a major direction of modern language study.In order to enhance the appeal and expression effects, to deliver more information effectively, advertising has changed from single modal to multimodal through text, images, etc. It is not difficult to find that the use of multimodal design in advertising has increasingly become a trend. Multimodal discourse analysis emerged in the 1990s. It based on systemic functional linguistics theory, and tried to use the theory to analyse images, music, language, gestures and other symbolic resources. Because these social symbols are also systematic, functional and hierarchical. This article attempts to use multimodal discourse theory to analyse advertising from the linguistic point of view. The language part and image part have been separately analysed through some examples. This study found that the text, images in advertising are able to express the concept of ideational meaning, interpersonal meaning and textual meaning.A good advertising is often inseparable from the proper use of rhetorical devices. As a commonly used rhetorical device, metaphor is not only easy to understand but also can make the reading process more interesting. Proper metaphor can let the audience feel the powerful impact and inspire people's desire to buy. Therefore, due to its unique features and effects in the creation, metaphor is gradually more and more used in advertising.Aristotle stressed that metaphor makes the language more vivid, Lakoff and others think that metaphor is not just a linguistic phenomenon, but it is also a basic way of thinking through language and nonverbal means. Advertising proves that metaphor can be also realized through the nonverbal forms, such as pictures, graphics or in the form of their combination. Further study of the corpus found that multimodal metaphor in advertising can be more detailed classified. This article attempts to summarize various types of multimodal advertising and find out the operating mechanism of multimodal metaphor, in order to explore the possibility of increasing the rhetorical effect in advertising. This article hopes its findings will help readers learn more about the multimodal expression and how to understand multimodal metaphor in advertising in a more systematic way.