| Nowadays,the rapid development of globalization and information technology have given rise to new illegal activities such as Internet fraud,personal information leakage,thus pushing forward improvement of the law.Legal media plays an important role in popularizing the law,often attracting people’s attention by means of cartoons.With multimodal metaphor,cartoons can express abstract legal concepts or legal act such as“fairness”,“justice”and“fraud” more vividly,leaving a deep impression on readers and improving their legal awareness effectively.This study is aimed at exploring the working mechanism and function of multimodal metaphor in legal cartoons systematically.Based on theories of conceptual metaphor,multimodal metaphor and functional linguistics,the study first classified the representation of multimodal metaphor in legal cartoons,then summarized the characteristics of multimodal metaphor and finally analyzed the function of multimodal metaphor in legal cartoons.The research corpus are legal cartoons from three China’s mainstream legal newspapers from December,2019 to September,2021.The study found that legal cartoons contain two types of metaphor types: image-text mapping and image-hidden mapping.Both types contain static and dynamic metaphors,the former expressing abstract legal concepts and latter expressing legal acts.Comparison research among different genres like political cartoons,advertisements and legal cartoons has also been conducted and found the difference in their modes use and the reason.Based on the above analysis,discourse function of multimodal metaphor in legal cartoons can be analyzed from perspectives of discourse topic,discourse cohesion and the evaluative meaning.The results are as follows:(1)By analyzing representation of metaphors from the corpus,the common metaphor structures used frequently can be found and they can help to highlight legal topics.(2)Cohesion of textual meaning can be studied from intra-textual cohesion and extra-textual cohesion,the former analyzed from conceptual meaning and interpersonal meaning,the latter from context.In metaphors composed of image and text,the relation between two modes are mainly expatiation and projection,in which text provides the explanation for the image or supplements new information.In the interpersonal meaning,the images in metaphor are mostly of high mood with high saturation and bright colors,which can easily attract readers’ attention,forming a cohesive relationship with the mood of text.As for the context,traditional Chinese culture and cognitive experience provide support for the construction and understanding of the metaphor.(3)The multimodal metaphor of legal cartoons mainly expresses judgment attitude,supporting fairness and justice,and criticizing lawbreaking,but rarely involves appreciation attitude.Because language can “ inscribe” attitude,the realization of evaluative meaning of image-text multimodal metaphor is more obvious and easier to be perceived by readers than that of metaphor only composed by images.The research findings can help to understand working mechanism and function of legal multimodal metaphors and offer advice for authors who can create cartoons with better effect in legal reports.Besides,there are also suggestions for future studies. |
PDF Full Text Request