Multimodal Metaphor Analysis On Printed Environmental Public-service Advertisement

The rapid development of the information technology since the 21 century has greatly broadened people’s modes of communication. The interaction among various social medium symbols, such as sound and image, also develops people’s way of communication from pure language to multi-mode. Many scholars thus put their effort into the study of multimodal discourses such as "multimodal discourse analysis" and "multimodal narration" and so on. However, the multimodal study under the theoretical frame of the system-functional linguistics ignores the conveying of the metaphorical meaning and the explanation of metaphorical construction of multimodal discourses. In addition, the trend of interdisciplinary research provides macroscopic context for the study of multimodal metaphor. Owing to their advantages in multi-disciplinary research background, Forceville and Urioa-Aparisi focus their study on multimodal metaphor, aiming at improving the conceptual metaphor theory based exclusively on pure language to other modes, uncovering the dynamic essence and construction process of multimodal metaphor.Under the guidance of the multimodal metaphor theory proposed by Forceville and Urios-Aparisi, this paper attempts to explore the distinctive features of multimodal metaphors in printed environmental public-service advertisements (EPSAs), the construction and the interpretation of multimodal metaphors in EPSAs and the process of realizing their persuasive function. The printed environmental public-service advertisements, as the analytic target of this paper, are collected from the public-service advertisements websites at home and abroad.Combining cognitive and pragmatic perspectives, this paper explores the distinctive features of the multimodal metaphors in EPSAs, namely the narrativity of causal relationship, the vividness of analogy and the concreteness of "entity is entity" Furthermore, this paper lays its emphasis on how the multimodal metaphors in EPSAs realize their persuasive function. The analysis demonstrates that the interpretation of multimodal metaphor is constrained by individuals’ emotional experience, cognition and cultural factors. The three aspects work together in achieving the persuasive function. Cognitive persuasion is achieved through semantic conflict to draw people’s attention, with partial mapping to highlight viewpoints and the interaction of the source and target domains to create similar cognitive experience; emotional persuasion is realized through the source domain transferring emotional preference to target domain and arousing negative emotional experience; cultural factors may exert influence on the selection of the source domain, thus affecting the cognitive and emotional persuasion.