A Cognitive Linguistic Study Of Multimodal Metaphors In American And Chinese Advertising

Thanks to globalization, different cultures have been on the way to integration, and the same is true for their advertising. However, the public often feel confused when distinguishing one piece of advertising from another. In response to this call for systemic studies on them scholars from many academies exert their efforts on analyzing metaphors in commercials, in terms of pictures and spoken languages. However, these attempts prove to be one tip of the iceberg as there are too many elements worth noticing in video advertising. It was until recently that public attention has been paid to the multimodal metaphors in commercials, but these scanty researches disperse in their subjects and have not included all the modalities, not to mention that a commercial is rich in carriers of conveying messages.This thesis attempts to make a comparative analysis of American and Chinese beer video advertising from the perspective of multimodal conceptual metaphor with the help of Multimodal Metaphor theory and some concepts borrowed from Conceptual Metaphor Theory. A corpus of 50 video advertising pieces of 10 beer brands, 5 from China and 5 from U.S.A. respectively, is established. By exploring into the mappings and entailments of these metaphors this thesis intends to find out the similarities and differences in using multimodalities, and then the universality and cross-cultural variations between these two countries, which might shed light on the understanding of beer advertising from America and China for potential consumers who want to spot the deep-rooted implications in advertising and for the businessmen who plan to pioneer in another market.Through thorough analyses this thesis concludes that similar conceptual metaphors, i.e. HAPPINESS IS DRINKING BEER and BEER IS A LIVING ORGANISM, exist in advertising from both countries which is rendered a result caused by universal embodiment and cultural congruence. Besides, visual modality remains to be the primary one in elaborating beer qualities. Nonetheless, their preference for modalities and the mappings and entailments underlying the conceptual metaphors differ between these two countries, which is under the impact of different ideological assumptions and cultural traits.