The Meaning Construction Of Multimodal Metaphor In Public Service Advertisements Based On Visual Grammar

Metaphor is considered as a common phenomenon in human language,and one of the important topics in the field of linguistics.Metaphor exists not only in language,but also in different modal systems such as images,sounds,gestures and so on.Public service advertisement(PSA),as an ideal multimodal corpus,involves verbal and pictorial modes which contain extensive utilization of metaphors.Hence,it is of theoretical and practical significance to study multimodal metaphor in PSAs.Guided by Forceville&Urios-Aparisi’s Multimodal Metaphor and Kress&Van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar,this thesis scrutinizes some cases of multimodal metaphor in PSAs and analyzes its meaning construction step by step.Thus,the following three questions are discussed in this paper:(1)What are basic mapping models of multimodal metaphors showing up in PSAs?(2)What are relationships between modes adopted for multimodal metaphors detectable in PSAs?(3)In PSAs,how can multimodal metaphor be constructed through three mechanisms of Visual Grammar,namely,"representational meaning","interactive meaning" and "compositional meaning"?With qualitative analysis,the major finding are concluded as follows:(1)The realization of multimodal metaphors mainly depends on three basic mapping modes:"cross-modal mapping","mono-modal mapping" and "multimodal mapping",while"cross-modal mapping" and "mono-modal mapping" occupying the majority,followed by"multimodal mapping";(2)In this thesis,verbal and pictorial modes of multimodal metaphors are "complementary"in most of PSAs to constitute its metaphorical information;(3)The meaning construction of multimodal metaphor in PSAs can be conducted from three aspects of Visual Grammar:for the "representational meaning",multimodal metaphor can be constructed by the substitution of "represented participants";in terms of the "interactive meaning",we can form metaphors through the structure "CAMERA POSITIONING IS IMAGE-VIEWER RELATION".As regards "compositional meaning",multimodal metaphor be constructed by the framework of "SPATIAL POSITION IS INFORMATION VALUE/SALIENCE/FRAMING".