An Analysis Of Multimodal Metaphor In Chinese Public Service Advertisements

Traditional metaphor study only focuses on verbal modes, i.e. languages. However, in the multimedia age, people inevitably get attracted by many other modes, like visual and aural modes. With the flourish of multimodal discourse, studies on metaphor also begin to develop from focusing on verbal mode to multi-mode. If the central idea of Conceptual Metaphor Theory that people’s thought and behavior are metaphorical in nature is correct, multimodal discourses must be full of metaphors. Public service advertisements (PSAs) which play an important role in promoting social values and improving social consciousness can be taken as a typical multimodal discourse, but previous studies of metaphor in PSAs are either restricted to verbal modes or conducted in very limited number of PSAs. Seldom do researchers analyze multimodal metaphor from the whole PSAs.Therefore, this research tries to analyze multimodal metaphor in Chinese PSAs from a macroscopic perspective, centering on three major questions. First, how is multimodal metaphor constructed in Chinese PSAs? Second, what are the features of source domain and target domain in different types of advertisements? And third, which mode of multimodal metaphor is more salient in PSAs? Is there any rule? To answer these questions, the qualitative method is adopted. It focuses on four major types of PSAs which are PSAs about natural environment, family, traditional culture and social morality. For every type,20 typical PSAs are selected to analyze the characteristics of multimodal metaphor, based on Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Forceville’s related theories about multimodal metaphor.The result of this study bears some theoretical and practical meanings. Above all, there are really a large number of multimodal metaphors in PSAs, which further tests the validity of Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Metaphor exists not only in verbal symbols but also in non-verbal symbols. Next, both the source and target domains of multimodal metaphor in PSAs can be manifested by entities, events and concepts, among which entities have the largest proportion in both domains and events also serve as domains frequently. This is in line with the concreteness of multimodal metaphor, proposed by Forceville. Furthermore, the result, by pointing out the manifestation of domains, is a complement to the features of multimodal metaphor. Then, according to the statistics of modes in multimodal metaphor, the most salient mode is visual mode and the least salient is aural mode. But aural mode can also convey much information in a different way, so as long as its value is further explored, PSAs can be more developed. Lastly, multimodal metaphor with mono-mapping accounts for the largest proportion in PSAs, but in order to make PSAs more various and unique, it is suggested to apply more multimodal metaphors with cross-modal mapping and multi-modal mapping into PSAs.