Cognitive Mechanism Of Multimodal Metaphor And Metonymy In Brexit Political Cartoons

Brexit political cartoons are generally constituted by social actors,action representation and potential outcomes in a nuanced,intriguing and humorous way to trigger fast thinking and emotional resonance.In the multimodal discourse,its construction and interpretation cover rich and complicated cognitive processes of metaphor-metonymy interplay which not necessarily underline the dominant role of language but highlight the dynamic interaction of various signs.Based on cognitive theoretical analysis,the thesis aims to advance empirical research on the cognitive mechanism of multimodal metaphor and metonymy in Brexit cartoons by employing the eye-tracking technique and retrospective report.In the eye-tracking experiment,36 Chinese participants are assigned to group A or B.They freely view one version of 32 cartoons either with English text or without while Eye-link 1000 eye tracker is recording data in real time.Participants need to give an online keyboard response to infer cartoonists’ attitudes towards Brexit and finally complete an offline retrospective report.The research is designed to deal with the following questions:(1)How cartoonists frame Brexit by mini-narrative metaphor scenarios and metaphor-metonymy interplay patterns?(2)How multimodal metaphors convey cartoonists’ potential or unconscious political stances in Brexit cartoons to achieve communicative effects?(3)How viewers in two groups get a grip on text-image or no-text Brexit cartoons by devoting different attention allocations to metaphorical and metonymic cues respectively?(4)What are the differences in cognitive strategy to process metaphor and metonymy between higher-accuracy and lower-accuracy viewers in each group?Based on Conceptual Metaphor and Critical Metaphor Analysis for “meaning production”,eye-tracking data and retrospective report for “meaning reception”,major findings are as follows:(1)Cartoonists prefer to frame JOURNEY,ANIMAL,DIVORCE metaphor scenarios by “metaphtonymy” and “metaphor amalgam” which emphasize extreme or irreversible consequences either for the UK or the EU.(2)Cartoonists frequently borrow historical figures,cultural symbols or national animals as source domains to indirectly post their opposite views or employ the “Trumping”strategy to activate contested reasoning in which the roles of social actors in the same scenario are switched to conceive Brexit as a self-destructive decision or a self-saving consciousness.(3)Most participants in group A early and frequently notice longer texts,especially verbal metaphors,integrate text and image by more regressions in intermediate and later phase while those in group B pay more attention to facial expressions,mainly visual metonymy,and give relatively fewer regressions.(4)Higher-accuracy participants in group A could effectively employ shorter dwell time to process verbal metaphors whereas those who devote more dwell time and fixations to visual metonymy tend to get higher accuracy in group B.To conclude,the research is expected to provide useful insights for cartoonists to design more convincing and appealing works and for observers to direct more meaningful and strategic attention.