Meaning Construction Of Multimodal Metaphors In Chinese Printed Real Estate Advertisements

With the rapid development of market economy and the improvement of living standards, people begin to seek the residence with increasingly high requirement. The real estate industry in China, as a result, has stepped into its flourish and become more and more competitive in recent years. Under the circumstances, the printed advertising for real estate, as an important means of promoting the product, emerged and developed rapidly. Chinese printed real estate advertisement (CPREA for short, hereafter), different from other commercial advertisements, is not only publicity of a commodity, but also a propose for a certain way of life and a kind of spiritual culture, therefore, the advertisements of real estate attach great importance to the creation of cultural atmosphere in order to convey the message of good state of life. This kind of implicit information actually needs to be delivered by metaphors with no doubt. In multimodal discourse of printed real estate, the meaning of the whole advertisement is often created by the interaction of the two modalities:verbal message and visual pictures. It is of great necessity to construe the metaphors in advertisements in order to get the specific meaning that the designers intend to express. Until recently, it has reached numerous achievements in the research on real estate advertisements and multimodal discourse analysis; however, there is little concern on CPREA from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, especially from the angle of multimodal metaphor. For this reason, the present thesis, based on the theory of multimodal discourse analysis, will study the meaning construction of multimodal discourse in CPREA from the perspective of orientational metaphor in order to reveal the process of forming and construing of multimodal metaphors.Multimodal discourse analysis is a new approach to discourse based on systemic-functional linguistics. It investigates, within the same discourse, the interaction between two different modalities such as verbal message and visual images, or more than these two resources. Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996) claimed that besides language, other forms of communication such as visual pictures also have ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function, and hence they proposed representational meaning, interactional meaning and compositional meaning, respectively corresponding to the three functions of systemic-functional linguistics in order to analyze visual pictures. And as a method of commodity publicity, printed advertisement of real estate must appear to have a certain amount of meanings to attract customers, therefore, the main task of this thesis is to study the interaction of the two modalities——visual image and verbal message in CPREA and the role of multimodal metaphor in the construction of meaning.The present paper first analyzes the characteristics of multimodal metaphors in CPREA, then, with the case study, it attempts to explain and interpret the meaning construction from cognitive perspective, revealing the significant role that multimodal metaphor plays in the establishment of meaning. After a detailed analysis of CPREA, the following conclusions can be drawn:first, conceptual metonymy and image schema are indispensable in the forming and construing multimodal metaphors; second, in the multimodal discourse of visual image and verbal text, the interaction of the two modalities generates metaphors, and as a result, the representational meaning, interactional meaning and compositional meaning of real estate advertisements come into being; third, the metaphorical meaning of multimodal real estate advertisements brings in its distinctive selling point——emotional resonance, which can effectively arouse the customers’interest; last, since the construal of multimodal metaphors is affected by various factors, the design of CPREA should be consonant with the rule of human cognition, taking into account the customers’cultural level and their specific requirement for the residences. In brief, the present study provides some useful suggestions for designers to crate more attractive and successful advertisements, and for the potential customers to interpret specific advertisement. The present study on CPREA, to certain extent, broadens the scope of metaphor research and enriches its theory, devoting itself to both aspects of theory and application.