A Cognitive Study Of Multimodal Metaphors In The Cartoon Film Wall-E

The emerging of metaphors and interpretation of them cannot be achieved without theexperiential perception of humans. Traditional studies of metaphor only pay attention to itsrhetoric features. In fact it is not complete to comprehend the production and deconstructionof metaphor only from the rhetoric aspects, as metaphor often involves some nonverbal facts,and sometimes there are no linguistic symbols involved in metaphors. Then from themultimodal perspective it is also called multimodal metaphor. There is no doubt that themultimodal metaphor, as one kind of metaphors, enjoys outstanding linguistic andnon-linguistic features. The understanding of a multimodal metaphor is hard to grasp in thelevel of linguistics, so we have to pay attention to the separated modes in it and find out howthey coordinated in contributing to the understanding of multimodal metaphors. In this process,the cognitive subjects need to identify the various modes, and then transfer the correspondingpsychological link mechanism to deconstruct the multimodal metaphor. At present, the studyof the multimodal metaphors in cartoon films makes up a certain portion, but the study of themultimodal metaphors in cartoon films is still in a starting stage.Wall-E is a breakthrough in the animated film history. The silent mode is adopted for thefirst half of the film, and then in the later half of film concise language together with colorfulpictures and fitting music is used in order to realize the theme of the movie. The analysis ofthe cartoon film Wall-E is significant in deepening the understanding of the each character androle. From the position of roles to the setting of plot, we can see that the film is achievedthrough multimodal metaphors, which is not only the highlight of the film but the key toappreciating the whole movie as well. Although the multimodal metaphors in Wall-E arerepresentative, the differences each mode makes in the metaphor are very big, so we choosethe pictorial mode, sonic mode and linguistic mode as the target modes. The relationship between the three modes, the interaction between them under certain principles and their rolesin the process of meaning construction will also be studied.Here we take the human factors, namely the subjective initiative of cognitive subjects asone of starting point in the multimodal metaphor researches. Cognitive linguistics, based onthe cognitive science and psycholinguistics, puts the human experience in the first place in thecomprehension of meanings. Cognitive linguists hold that language is only one part of humancognitive abilities and objective entities existed in other forms also bear certain meanings,which emerge from the interaction between the cognitive subjects and the environment. Thecognitive subjects understand the world through looking for the similar or related pointsbetween the salient objects in the world and the embodied experience that they acquire.Human categorized theory, known as the idealized cognitive model, plays a basic role in theface of the changing world in this process. It is put forward by Lakoff in1982and1987, withits view that people generally pay attention to the salient parts to identify the whole and thennotice the other components, which provides a foundation in identifying and understandingeach conceptual domain. Next we always seek for similarities between ourselves and theentities to be understood, that is to understand one in terms of that one, which is the corepoints of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), which is put forward by Lakoff in1980s.According to his theory, human thinking is metaphoric. Our most fundamental ideas—not justtime, but events, causation, morality, the self, and so on—were almost entirely structured byelaborate systems of conceptual metaphors. In the comprehension of multimodal metaphors,we generally understand one domain in terms of the other domain, which is more basic thanthe former. The comprehension of multimodal metaphors also needs to look for thecorresponding relations between two domains, which provide an important theoreticalfoundation for the analysis of the multimodal metaphors in the cartoon film Wall-E.Based on CMT, the author analyzes multimodal metaphors in Wall-E from a cognitiveperspective in micro-level and explores the construal and meaning construction of multimodal metaphors in Wall-E. According to the analysis, we can draw a conclusion as follows.First, we can draw a conclusion that the pictorial mode is the most basic mode in therealization of a certain domain in providing information and then the linguistic mode issecondary and last one is the sonic mode in the deconstruction of the multimodal metaphorsin Wall-E.Second, the present study provides a new perspective in the study of multimodalmetaphors in cartoon films. Through the analysis of the multimodal metaphors in Wall-E,their significant textual functions are obtained. The frequently use of multimodal metaphorscontributes to unfolding the plot of Wall-E, shaping the characters as Wall-E and Eve.Third, according to the analysis of the multimodal metaphors in the cartoon film Wall-E,we can find if one domain is rendered pictorially, the other domain tends to be renderedalmost arbitrarily (rendered in pictorial mode, in sonic mode, in linguistic mode or thecombination of them). This conclusion is in contradiction with the conclusion drawn byForceville that “if one of the domains is exclusively cued visually and the other exclusivelyverbally, it tends to be that the target is visually cued and the source is verbally cued.”(2009:8) In addition, in Wall-E, if the source ICM is realized in pictorial mode, the target ICM isgenerally realized in pictorial mode and linguistic mode or the pictorial and sonic mode or thecombination of the three.