A Cross Cultural Study On Multimodal Metaphors In Posters

Multimodal metaphors in verbal-pictorial type posters of English, French and Chineseversions are explored primarily in this thesis. It examines how a comparative study undertakenfrom a trilingual perspective can throw light on the way environmental protection and green lifeare conceptualized in posters in times of2010Shanghai World Expo. Health and mission arecaptured as the common source domains in the three types of posters, while differences are alsocaptured through the analysis.To begin with, the research work in question adopts a comprehensive view in which bothquantitative and qualitative ideas are taken into consideration from the features of personification,wild life, physical entity, pressure, health and mission. Being the working corpora, the collected90posters are sampled and their tokens are inspected and calculated based on pictorial metaphor.Subsequently, differences in features of multimodal metaphors in posters of three languagecontexts are concluded.The major findings reveal that while the three languages are similarly rich in multimodalmetaphors and they all use health and mission as the main subjects associated with the targetdomains, significant differences appear in terms of target audience, focus of conceptualization,color and cross-cultural connotations. These differences lie in the personification and physicalentity used in Chinese posters and pressure featured in English posters. The French posters preferto use verbally depicted posters to highlight deeper thinking for environment. The resultsfurthermore demonstrate that systematic patterns and correlations can be identified in relation tothe modes in which the main sources and target domains are cued and to the range of metaphorsascertained, which shows that the overall implications are intrinsically linked to the specificgenre of data investigated. The color mainly lies in green and blue in all three kinds of posters.Color red is more frequently used in French and English posters to give people warning. Colorwhite is specifically used for light in French ones and color yellow is mainly depicted assunshine for English ones and color brown is only used in Chinese posters to depict the earth.The French posters take sustainable development as the major theme more frequently than theother two.Tentative suggestions are put forward in the end so as to contribute to the multimodalmetaphor study.