A Cognitive Exploration Into Multimodal Metaphor And Metonymy In Political Cartoons

The conceptual metaphor and metonymy theory have over the last a few decades sought to support the claim that humans'pervasive use of verbal metaphor and metonymy reflects the fact that they think and conceptualize the world metaphorically and metonymically. However, if the conceptual nature claim is correct, evidences should go beyond the verbal mode and extend to other modes of communication such as picture, music, gesture and so on.The focuses of this research are the manifestation of multimodal metaphor and metonymy in the area of political cartoons, how the two interact, and how the different modes interact. Such a study is important in that it pays equal attention to metaphor and metonymy and takes dynamic interaction in consideration. This dissertation met these research aims through an extensive study of relevant literature and the implementation of data analysis. The latter was carried out by an identification-interpretation-explanation procedure with the first step based on modified models of Panther's (2006) models of metaphoric and metonymic relation from a semiotic viewpoint.This research produces a number of findings:pictorial metaphors in political cartoons can be categorized into contextual metaphor, simile and hybrid metaphors; unlike the pictorial metaphors, pictorial metonymies do not possess these categories because of its domain-internal nature; metaphors and metonymies in cartoons often reveal a scenario nature which leads to scenario metaphor and metonymy in certain cases; verbal modes will interact with pictorial mode in both metaphor and metonymy in three forms:labels, titles and message boxes, highlighting either the target or the source or the mapping process; metaphors and metonymies interact in certain ways:metonymic motivation of the metaphoric target, metaphoric reduction of metonymic mappings, and metonymic context for the identification of mappings. These findings from this research provide evidence that metaphors and metonymies are conceptual in nature though they could be more creative in pictorial manifestation. To achieve a more objective and complete theory, empirical studies are recommended for future researches. And attention should be given to the generic features of metaphor and metonymy representations like the use of creative v.s. conventionalized expressions, directions of mappings, etc.