Study Of Metaphor And Metonymy In Multimodal Discourse

Metaphor and metonymy, as the pervasive linguistic cognition, reflect the way in which human beings conceptualize the world. It has been testified by the related studies during the past thirty years. However, if the claim about the conceptual essence is correct, the converging evidence should cover multimodal modes, like pictures, sounds, gestures, rather than language alone.Based on the theory of Conceptual Metaphor and Metonymy and the latest research outcomes of multimodal metaphor and metonymy, this thesis conducts a analysis of the Publicity Film on the image of Shanghai and the Expo2010Shanghai China from the cognitive linguistic angle and consequently finds out how the massages are passed and communicated through multimodal metaphor and metonymy, which unfolds how the meanings are constructed through metaphor and metonymy. On the cognitive linguistic analysis, the present research adopts the qualitative research method and is carried out systematically in the procedure of "Description-Identification-Interpretation-Discussion".It is found that, in this publicity film, a certain mono-mode containing or not containing the metaphoric and metonymic meanings interacts with other modes to construct the whole meanings of the multimodal metaphor and metonymy. Metonymy provides a necessary precondition for metaphor, and metaphor gives a restriction to the choice of features mapped between domains of the metonymy. It leads to the different discoursal roles of metaphor and metonymy, in which the former plays a role of "principal axis" to run through the whole publicity microfilm while the latter plays a role of paving the way for the central metaphor. In sum, this thesis provides more converging evidence for conceptual metaphor and metonymy in multimodal discourse and proves that the study on metaphor and metonymy can cover more communication signs of multimodality.