A Comparative Study Of Multimodal Metaphors In Chinese And English Bank Advertisements

In recent years, one of the focuses of academic research in humanities has shifted from purely verbal texts to multimodal discourses. Such an inescapable trend towards multimodality also begins to emerge in the cognitive linguistic field.According to the conceptual metaphor theory, metaphor is not primarily a matter of language but a matter of thought. In this sense, metaphor can be found in other modes besides language, and thus purely verbal metaphor study has great limitations, which, to some extent, can be complemented by the multimodal metaphor study.Based on the conceptual metaphor theory and the relevance theory, this research compares multimodal metaphors of the verbo-pictorial type in forty-six Chinese and English bank advertisements. By qualitative analyses of six print ads for banks and selective analyses of another forty ads, the thesis examines how the financial entities and banking products/services are conceptualized through multimodal metaphors, verifies whether metonymies play a role in the motivation and interpretation of multimodal metaphors, and also makes a comparison between the multimodal metaphors underlying the Chinese print ads for banks and the English ones.Some important findings have been obtained from this study and can be summarized as follows:First, though not found in every print advertisement for banks, metonymies do play an important role in the motivation and interpretation of multimodal metaphors. Second, important similarities, such as the inclinations to choose living creatures as source domains, cue target domains verbally, and frequently use the contextual type of pictorial metaphor, if any, have been found between the multimodal metaphors underlying the Chinese print ads for banks and those underlying the English ones. Third, significant differences have been revealed in the aspects of cultural influences, modes involved in cueing source domains, and focuses of the multimodal metaphors. To be more specific, the multimodal metaphors in Chinese bank ads are more culturally bounded than those of English bank ads, the source domains in the Chinese data are almost suggested exclusively pictorially whereas the source domains in the English data have almost the same tendency to be cued pictorially as to be cued by both words and pictures, and the multimodal metaphors in Chinese bank ads mainly focus on promoting the banking products/services while those of the English data mostly focus on advertising the financial entities. These findings are expected to shed light on people’s cognition and the strategies and characteristics of advertising in addition to future studies in this field.Although the present study proves the applicability and effectiveness of the conceptual metaphor theory and the relevance theory in analyzing multimodal metaphors, a more integrated and mature theory system still needs to be developed. Besides, more large-scale experiments and statistical researches are expected to be undertaken in this field.