Meaning Construction Of Multimodal Metaphors And Metonymies In Tibet Of Wild China

Metaphor and metonymy have been an important means as a thinking pattern toconceptualize the world. In traditional way, the study of the conceptual metaphor andmetonymy has been focusing on verbal language to explore types and the construal ofmeaning from cognitive perspective. Nevertheless, the meaning also exists in thenonverbal semiotics such as pictures, sounds, and gestures, which can convey moreexact and precise information than that in the purely verbal mode. In China, relatedstudies have been conducted providing enough evidence to testify the nature and typesof metaphor or metonymy.In recent years, the researches of multimodal discourse analysis develop fastfrom the systematic functional perspective and the cognitive perspective. The researchdata varied from advertisements, cartoons and promotional films whose researchobjectives concentrated on description, identification, interpretation of multimodalmetaphor and metonymy types. However, how the meaning is constructed by thetypes of multimodal metaphors and metonymies and their corresponding modalitiesin the documentary genre is scarcely touched upon.This thesis is based on Conceptual Metaphor and Metonymy Theory by Lakoffand Interaction Theory by Ruiz de Mendoza and Diez Velasco and the latest outcomeof multimodal metaphor and metonymy by Charles Forceville. Taking the large-scaledocumentary film---Tibet of Wild China as analytic data, the thesis attempts toidentify the types of multimodal metaphors and metonymies and then tries to find themodels how the meaning is constructed by multimodal metaphors and metonymiesand various modalities.The thesis adopts the quantative and qualitative methodologies under cognitivemechanism through the procedure of description, identification, interpretation anddiscussion and intends to answer the following questions:1. What are the types of multimodal metaphors and metonymies in the chosenmultimodal discourse?2. How is the meaning constructed by multimodal metaphors and metonymiesand their corresponding modalities in Tibet of Wild China?The findings of thesis are as follows: Firstly, types of the metaphor areontological metaphors including “person” metaphor and “container” metaphor,structural metaphors highlighting “home” metaphor,“harmony” metaphor,“fight”metaphor and “journey” metaphor and orientational metaphors of “up” metaphor and “front” metaphor. Secondly, multimodal metonymies mainly concentrated on thepart-for–whole type, specifically, individuals standing for the collection, typicalcharacteristics of entity standing for the entity and sub-events presenting complexevents and the ordinary people standing for the special traders. Lastly, multimodalmetaphors and metonymies with various modalities interacted to construct themeaning of discourse with the patterns that interaction between modalities ensures themeaning of a individual plot, interaction between multimodal metaphors andmetonymies makes the meaning chained, cognitive coherent function of metaphorguarantees discourse meaning and isolated metonymy creates the meaning.