Research On Language In Metaphorical Multimodal Commercial Advertising

At the end of the 20 th century with the rise of cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology, the research of metaphor gradually developed from traditional Science of Metaphor to Cognitive Science of Metaphor. Metaphor wasn’t only a rhetoric, but also a way of thinking and cognizing. Therefore, metaphor not only exists in language, but in daily life. Our thinking and action are full of metaphor. If the tenet of CSM is correct, metaphor should manifest itself not just in language but via other modes of communication, such as pictures, music, sounds, and gestures. Forceville called these symbols as multimode differ from mono-mode. Then he suggested a concept Multimodal Metaphor, which is a metaphor whose target and source are rendered exclusively or predominantly in two different modes. Multimodal metaphor is widely used in modern commercial advertising, making the advertising more vivid and profound, letting customers remember deeper.As the core mode to deliver information in advertising, what’s the role of language in multimode. According to the types of advertising and the interaction of language and non-language, with qualitative description method and image/audio editing method, we analyze that in print ads, language plays three functions, while in audio-visual advertising, language plays five functions. The function of language mainly reflects in constructing the meaning of multimodal metaphor. In the interaction between verbal and picture, animation, the non-verbal modes, how can language deliver the meaning of metaphor, realizing the aim of advertising.Besides, in multimodal metaphor, language shows some obvious features in the using of language and sentence pattern. This thesis analyze the features of language systematically and comprehensively. In brief, this thesis analyze language in multimodal metaphor by the cases of commercial advertising from two dimensions: function and feature.This thesis is trying to give some inspiration to the usage of language in commercial advertising that contain multimodal metaphor.