Construction Of Multimodal Metaphor In Commercial Print Advertisements: Sign-value’s Multimodal Metaphorical Expression

Today’s society has become highly industrialized with immensely abundant material goods.Consumption in our mind no longer aims at objective function but the sign-value connoted in the objects.Commercial print advertisement is one of the prominent carriers of sign consumption thoughts with rich multimodal metaphorical resources.It takes on an excellent marketing function of material goods.Rhetorical devices such as metaphors in advertising could elicit more cognitive elaboration and motivate imaginary procession.Meanwhile,metaphoric advertising could enhance brand attitudes and consumers’ purchase intention.Therefore,the study integrates systemic functional Visual Grammar,multimodal metaphor views,and the working mechanism of Conceptual Metaphor Theory to investigate multimodal metaphor in advertisements,attempting to answer the following questions: 1)What are the representational meaning structures of multimodal metaphors in selected commercial print advertisements?2)how do representational meaning construction processes of multimodal metaphors produce sign-value in selected commercial print advertisements? 3)why do selected commercial print advertisements apply multimodal metaphors to convey sign-value? Besides,through collection and selection,this study builds a micro corpus of 90 commercial print advertisements and annotates the data with the aid of NVivo 12.Based on the statistical results and qualitative analysis,this study finds that: 1)conceptual structure takes up 86.7% of representational meaning processes,making up an overwhelming majority,while narrative structure only takes up 13.3%.The analytical process is the most frequent meaning construction process of metaphor which takes up 71.1% because it can balance efficiency of conveying marketing position and fun of understanding and deduction process of the advertisement.2)anomalies are created in the process of multimodal metaphor construction by substituting or replacing the conventional members,adding unconventional members to context,or juxtaposing unconventional members with conventional categories.Therefore,the whole context of an advertisement is divided into two phenomena which can be regarded as the source domain and target domain,and features of products will be mapped between two domains.Marketing positions and sign-values will be highlighted by anomalies.3)“differentiation”,“naturalization” and “culturalization” are the most prominent manifestation forms of sign-value hidden in multimodal metaphors of the selected commercial print advertisements.Delicately embedded in multimodal metaphors’ construction process,sign-value conceals itself perfectly.The market has more space to stimulate people’s consumption desire by relegating and weakening the objective function but promoting signvalue.This interdisciplinary study adds new theoretical perspectives to linguistics and brings enlightening micro angle for the consumption culture of sociology and economics.Besides,it provides practical suggestions for advertisers and a warning for customers to reflect their irrational consumption behavior.