A Critical Study Of Multimodal Metaphors In American Political Cartoons With Special Reference To Cartoons On China-US Trade War

As the essential way of human thinking and behavior,metaphor is also a critical way for human beings to perceive the world and construct meaning.The research subject of previous studies on metaphor mainly focuses on discourse.As the research progresses,scholars gradually realize that traditional cognitive linguistics,which is only concerned with purely linguistic representations,is inadequate in metaphor research.Therefore,some scholars propose that metaphors can also be conveyed through music,images,gestures,and other modalities,and this idea lays the foundation for the development of multimodal metaphors.As a kind of news discourse that can influence public opinion,the political cartoon that contains abundant multimodal metaphors has become the focus of scholars because of its visual and textual modes.However,most scholars have studied multimodal metaphors in terms of their mapping mechanism or the interaction between metaphors and metonymy,but few have studied them in terms of ideology,social culture,and political stance.Critical Metaphor Analysis aims to reveal the ideology behind texts,but most scholars have applied it to analyze the metaphors existing in the text,and few of them apply it in multimodal discourse.Therefore,based on previous studies,this dissertation attempts to use the Critical Multimodal Metaphor Analysis to study the multimodal metaphor of political cartoons from three aspects: metaphor identification,metaphor interpretation,and metaphor explanation.This dissertation takes the cartoons about the China-US trade war that are collected from the political cartoon website of the United States as the research subjects and applies the Critical Multimodal Metaphor Analysis to answer the following three questions:(1)What kind of conceptual metaphors are used in American political cartoons of the China-US trade war?(2)Which features are highlighted in the process of metaphor mapping?(3)What are the factors affecting the choice of metaphors in cartoons? What functions are these multimodal metaphors embodied?This thesis classifies eight kinds of metaphors to describe the trade war by the types of source domains.They are the animal metaphor,the body metaphor,the building metaphor,the human being metaphor,the food metaphor,the journey metaphor,the natural phenomenon metaphor,and the object metaphor.In the process of metaphor mapping,cartoonists map some features of the source domain,such as competition,injury,and anxiety,to the target domain of the China-US trade war,expressing that China-US trade war will only damage the interests of both sides.Besides,factors such as ideology,history,culture,and political stance play a significant role in the choice of metaphors.Finally,the thesis concludes that the multimodal metaphors of trade war cartoons have the functions of information selection,emotional stimulation,and cohesion enhancement.For example,these cartoons arouse the American nationals’ concern about their economy and the dissatisfaction with the American government’s attitude towards trade war by highlighting the serious consequences of the China-US trade war.By examining these political cartoons,this study helps us to describe the server consequences of the China-US trade war from a metaphorical perspective.It also provides a new research perspective for the study of multimodal metaphors.