The Dynamic Construction Of Multimodal Metonymy And Metaphor From The Perspective Of Conceptual Blending Theory

Nowadays, the rapid development of information technology promotes multimedia and internet communication technology. Information transmission is not only relying on a single mode of text, but in many communicative situations, people use image, color, audio, and video and some other symbolic systems in meaning construction. Multimodality is used everywhere. With the wide application of multimodal communication, multimodal discourse analysis gradually becomes one of the focuses in linguistic research. Metaphor and metonymy, as the fundamental thinking modes of human beings, are the pervasive phenomena in daily life. The print advertisements, as the typical multimodal discourse, employ a large number of metaphors and metonymies. They interact to each other and have some special features. So the study of metaphor and metonymy is also working into the scope of multimodal studies.This thesis is based on the study of multimodal metaphor and metonymy in cognitive linguistics, using the framework of Conceptual Blending Theory to analyze multimodal metonymy and metaphor in the case of print advertisements and to discuss the meaning construction in multimodal print advertisements. It takes multimodal metonymy and metaphor in print advertisements as the objects of analysis under the qualitative research approach, and then interprets the dynamic construction of multimodal metonymy and metaphor, that is, their mutual interaction from conceptual blending point of view. Based on the actual case analysis, this thesis places metonymy and metaphor in the equal state, interprets that the integrative meaning construction of multimodal discourse can be achieved by means of blending and interplaying of multimodal metonymy and metaphor. Meaning construction is a complicated dynamic process in which multimodal metonymy and metaphor interact to and restrict with each other. And this thesis reveals that metonymy is more essential to the construction of concepts. Meanwhile, this thesis employs the Conceptual Blending Theory as the theoretical framework of cognitive approach to multimodal discourse analysis and further proves the explanatory power and applicability of this theory in interpreting print advertisements and analyzing image-text relation built by multimodal metaphor and metonymy. Multimodal metaphor and metonymy can be used to make print advertisements have higher aesthetic value, thereby achieving persuasive function.