A Multimodal-Cognitive Study On Emotion Metaphors In Horror Film

With the rapid development of the social economy,emotional intelligence has increasingly become an indispensable ability in an individual’s social life.It requires social individuals to control and express their emotions correctly,mastering the ability of emotion detection,emotion identification,emotion processing,and so forth.The horror film,as one of the typical genres of film,mainly displays the plot by presenting the different emotional states of the characters,which creates an immersive feeling for the audience.The appreciation process requires the participation of emotional intelligence,which,in turn,can potentially help the audience identify,understand,and deal with emotions.As a result,it provides guidance for the audience to express and mediate their emotions effectively.But owing to the abstract feature of emotions,it is usual for people to depend on emotion metaphors to concrete,categorize and clarify emotions in order to make emotions understandable.Thus,the metaphorical analysis and interpretation of emotions not only facilitates the identification and comprehension of emotions to cultivate a feeling of empathy but also enriches the research and practices of different emotion expressive ways in the horror film.The present study selects a successful classic English horror film,The Conjuring,as the research discourse.From the cognitive perspective,this research initially identifies emotion metaphors with the tool of MIPVU developed by Steen et al.(2010)and categorizes data with the emotion clarification method put forward by Shaver et al.(2001).Then,with the application of quantitative and qualitative multimedia data analysis software NVivo12 Plus,the imported data are edited,coded,marked,and counted by the code nodes.Meanwhile,under the guidance of the theoretical framework which combines the Conceptual Metaphor Theory,multimodal metaphor theory,emotion metaphor theory,and Visual Grammar with the Music Force Theory,this thesis analyzes the meaning construction of emotional metaphorical representations and explores the cognitive function of information transmission in the horror film quantitatively and qualitatively.The following three questions are focused in this study:(1)What are the types,ratios,and features of emotion metaphors in the horror film?(2)How do different types of emotion metaphors construct metaphorical meaning in the horror film?(3)What are the cognitive functions of emotion metaphors in the horror film?The major findings of the three research questions are presented as follows:In answer to the first question,based on the types of involved emotions and the mapping features of emotion metaphors,there exist mainly three categories and six types of emotion metaphors in the horror film.The first category is negative emotion metaphor,accounting for the largest proportion of 69.87%,including fear metaphor(65.70%),sadness metaphor(3.07%),and anger metaphor(1.10%).The second category,which ranks second,is positive emotion metaphor(11.13%),including happiness metaphor(4.81%)and love metaphor(6.32%).The third category,neutral emotion metaphor,takes the smallest proportion(0.32%).Furthermore,15 types of multimodal emotional metaphorical representations in the horror film are generalized,in which four types of representations are applied most frequently:(1)source domain:pictorial and language mode—target domain: implicit(21.91%);(2)source domain:pictorial and sound mode—target domain: implicit(20.72%);(3)source domain:pictorial,sound and music mode—target domain: implicit(13.15%);(4)source domain:pictorial,language and music mode—target domain: implicit(11.16%).But other types of representations are relatively rare.It can be seen that picture,language,sounds,and music modes are adopted most frequently in all the emotional metaphorical representations in horror film.Additionally,a large number of metaphorical emotion mappings involve the participation of metonymy,in which “the cause of emotion representing the emotion”(CAUSE OF EMOTION FOR THE EMOTION)and “the consequence of emotion symbolizing the emotions”(EFFECT OF EMOTION FOR THE EMOTION)are commonly adopted as causation metonymic forms.Among them,physical signs are applied most frequently to represent emotions in visual mode.As for the second question,though different emotion metaphorical expressions have different emphasis in meaning constructions process,the representations close to reality are usually adopted to construct the emotion metaphors intuitively,including orientational metaphorical representations and ontological metaphorical representations.Namely,“A HIDDEN ENEMY” is “FEAR”,“A DANGEROUS ANIMAL” means“ANGER”,“BLUE” or “GAEY” indicates “SADNESS”,“UP” or “BEING OFF THE GROUND” stands for “HAPPINESS.” As to the audience of horror films,it is the connection between the audio-visual elements and personal body experience or the known information that provides them with an immersed film appreciation experience.Based on the similarity between the source domain and the target domain,this emotional information can facilitate people in comprehending the emotional expressions in film to appreciate the film.In answer to the last question,emotion metaphors in horror films have four functions: narrative function,social function,aesthetic function and creative function.The narrative function constructs similarity between the source domain and the target domain mainly by the interaction of metaphorical representations,including the pictorial,language,sounds and music modes.With the cause,process and result of emotions presented,the plot of the film is displayed to express emotions.Social function mainly refers to communicative function,empathic function,moral reasoning function and danger warning function.It can comprehensively develop the audience’s emotional intelligence and empathy by promoting their ability of emotion identification,comprehension,expression and mediation to realize the reviewers’ social value.The aesthetic function can,on the one hand,stimulate the imagination of the audience,and help them find beauty by applying emotional metaphorical representations.On the other hand,it can construct cross-domain mappings of different representational modes.With the combination of visual modes and audio modes,a sense of beauty can be cultivated in the audience.Additionally,the creative function is realized by constructing brand-new and creative metaphorical representations.The metaphorical emotion expressive way is in accord with human cognitive principles and breaks the clichés of emotion expression.Not only can it reduce the familiarity of the viewers and provide them with a novel experience of emotion expression and perception,but also offer the filmmakers of horror films an innovative approach to describing emotion.Generally speaking,the present study is conducted scientifically based on the previous theoretical fruit.It not only broadens the research scope of emotion metaphor study but also manifests the feasibility of conceptual metaphor theory in interpreting the horror film discourse,consolidating the universality of cognitive metaphor theory to some extent.Moreover,the interpretation of multimodal representations of emotion metaphors in horror film can not only help the horror film viewers to comprehend the abstract emotion concepts but also provide the audience with a reference to emotion expression in social life.Additionally,for the filmmakers of horror films,the multimodal emotion metaphor expression approach is presented as an innovative way of creation.