A Cognitive Study Of Multimodal Metaphors In Chinese Print Public Service Advertising

The Lakoff-and-Johnsonian presupposition that metaphor is not primarily a matterof language but essentially a cognitive phenomenon structuring human thought hasover the past three decades been extensively acknowledged and amply underpinnedby uncountable verbal cases. However, if, according to Conceptual Metaphor Theory(CMT),“metaphor is not a figure of speech, but a mode of thought”(Lakoff,1993:210), metaphor can and should manifest itself in other modes of communication suchas picture, music, gesture etc. than language alone. Moreover, if the examination ofnon-verbal cases cannot yield robust findings, what being claimed as “metaphoricalnature of human thinking”(Forceville&Urios-Aparisi,2009:4) will be overthrown.For this reason, Charles Forceville, along with numerous scholars, has broken throughthe limitation of purely verbal metaphors and put forward the concept of non-verbaland multimodal metaphors, thus ushering in a brand-new research field, with anintention to testify the feasibility of CMT and also explore features uniquelybelonging to multimodal metaphors.Print PSA (Public Service Advertising), due to its co-occurrence of verbal andpictorial modes and extensive utilization of metaphors, serves as ideal research corpusin the present thesis. Taking Max Black’s Interaction Theory of Metaphor as thestarting point and integrating six influencing factors (message, code, channel, context,communicator and addressee) borrowed from Jakobson’s communication model, thethesis proposes a model for the identification and interpretation of multimodalmetaphors and subsequently conducts a cognitive study of the multimodal metaphorsin Chinese print PSA, including print PSA about health and safety, aboutanti-corruption and finally about social morality. In the analyzing process, threequestions indispensable for anything purporting to be a metaphor are asked and answered:(1) what are the two terms (primary subject&secondary subject) of themetaphor;(2) which of the two terms is the primary subject and which is thesecondary subject;(3) what feature(s) is/are projected from the secondary subjectupon the primary subject.Several important achievements are realized in the research. First and mostimportantly, the feasibility and effectiveness of the model proposed in the presentthesis is fully testified. Secondly, it is found that the mode distribution in multimodalmetaphors of the verbo-pictorial type is highly influenced by the concreteness/abstractness degree of the primary and secondary subject. Thirdly, the constructionand interpretation of multimodal metaphors, similar to its verbal sisters, is not onlyembodied but also highly cultural-bonded. Moreover, the utilization of culturalelements has to do with the major concern of the PSA; the more cultural-specific thetopic is, the more likely the cultural elements are employed. Last but not the least, forthe same primary subject, choosing different secondary subjects means differentfeatures being projected upon the primary subject. However, those diversifiedsecondary subjects, though different from each other, share something in common aswell.