| Discourse analysis, as a crucial part of linguistics, traditionally analyzesdiscourses from the level of language only. However, with the development ofsociety, images, sounds and other media also become an important component ofdiscourses. In consequence, discourse analysis should be raised to the multimodallevel. Multimodal discourses refer to discourses that are composed of at least twomeaning-making semiotic resources. Cartoons, composed of images and words,serve as a perfect example of multimodal discourses, and well worth discussion.Cartoons, according to different topics, can be divided into three groups ingeneral, that is, news cartoons, creational cartoons and advertisement cartoons. Ofthese, news cartoons are distinguished from others. In essence, news cartoons are akind of news reporting and commenting, center on political events home and abroad,and aim to exert influence on the public. Although news cartoons play such animportant role in people’s life, they haven’t gained fair enough attention in thelinguistic field, multimodal discourse analysis to be specific. There are only fewlinguistic studies on news cartoons. As for studies which do take news cartoons asstudy objects, they are only applied studies and never give news cartoons asystematic analysis. Besides, they also neglect the own features of news cartoons.Based on the above, this thesis, taking news cartoons as the subject, tries to make afull explanation on the meaning construction process of news cartoons from acognitive perspective.According to Peirce’s theory, symbol is a contrived, arbitrary or conventionalsign whose function is to refer to something. Picture signs in news cartoons, can allbe interpreted as other things by culture or context. Therefore, they can be defined assymbol. We can get the picture meaning by analyzing their symbolic meaning. Onthe other hand, the function of words in news cartoons is only complementing orconsolidating information. Then by combining meanings of picture signs and words the holistic meaning of news cartoons can be achieved. This discourse meaning,however, always confronts with the judgments made by our common value judgmentsystem. These two then go through the conceptual blending process and form theemergent meaning of the news cartoon, achieving the sarcastic and humorous effectsof news cartoons. Symbol-blending model is a model that integrates symbol intoconceptual blending. The model keeps the complete frame of conceptual blending,but refines the process. The thesis then further chooses100pieces of news cartoonsas a closed study objects, categorizes them into four groups, namely national politicaland social affairs, international political and social affairs, economy development andpeace and war. Then one piece from each group is picked out to testify theSymbol-blending model. The results show that this model can give a reasonableexplanation of meaning construction process of all news cartoons.Based on cognitive linguistics, this thesis constructs a Symbol-blending modelto illustrate the discourse meaning of news cartoons. The thesis develops theconceptual blending theory and widens its explanation power in multimodaldiscourse analysis. At the same time, it provides a new angle for the interpretation ofnews cartoons. |
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