| Metaphor, as a way of thinking, is widely used in people’s daily communications. In printed advertisement, the metaphor rendered exclusively or predominantly in verbal and pictorial modes is one kind of multimodal metaphor. It yields implicit persuasiveness by motivating the audience to identify and interpret itself.From cognitive and pragmatic perspectives, this study tentatively constructs the persuasion model of metaphor. It aims to explore the multimodal representation, persuasive process, as well as the constraining function of cognition, emotion and cultural absorption in the persuasiveness of metaphor. The research corpus is selected from Chinese and Western official websites of big brands, through the filter of metaphor identifying methods. Based on the mapping relations of verbal and pictorial modes in constituting a metaphor, the multimodal metaphor is divided into three categories:Cross-modal, Mono-modal and Multimodal mapping.The findings suggest that a metaphor can be co-realized by verbal and pictorial modes, and its source domain and target domain can be both concrete entities. In the advertisement for concrete products, the pictorial mode directly or metonymically represents the product advertised or usually the target domain of metaphor, and its source domain; as to the advertisement for abstract products, it merely presents the source domain; whereas the verbal mode can presents the source and the target separately, or both simultaneously. Besides, under contextual constraints, cognitive and emotional functions of metaphor interact with each other to exert persuasiveness, that is, high-involved cognition brings forth emotional preferences, which in turn produce relevant evaluations and attitudes towards the product. Furthermore, this paper demonstrates by contrastive studies that although the persuasion of multimodal metaphor turn to be universal to some extent, it is largely rooted in cultural knowledge like contextuality, view of nature, beliefs and customs. |
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