A Study Of Multimodal Metaphors In Apple’s New Product Launches

Metaphor has been a hotspot in linguistic field since Lakoff & Johnson (1980) proposed the notion "conceptual metaphor" in their masterpiece Metaphors We Live By. Due to the rapid development of multimedia technology, metaphor, as a thinking pattern permeating in everyday life, rather than confined to verbal language only, can also be rendered by many other modes, such as pictorial mode, non-verbal sound mode and gesture mode, etc. And such kind of metaphor is widely acknowledged as multimodal metaphor. Researches on multimodal metaphor in recent years have been generally conducted around static multimodal discourse with a few based on dynamic multimodal discourse around different genres, such as cartoons, advertising and television publicity, etc. However, multimodal metaphor in commercial launch remains a research gap to be further studied.The thesis probes into multimodal metaphors in commercial launch based on a self-built corpus of six videos of Apple’s New Product Launches selected from 2010 to 2015 with a mixed method of quantitative and qualitative approaches. Major findings are as follows:(1) There are 69 multimodal metaphors identified in the corpus, which can be classified into 7 types in terms of entities of both domains. They are S-function T-product, S-property T-product, S-property T-company, S-function T-company, S-influence T-product, S-property T-retail store and S-property T-event, among which the most pervasive type is S-function T-product, with a proportion of 62.32%, followed by S-property T-product, occupying 21.74% and the other 5 types are less than 5%. This indicates that in order to achieve the goal of advertising the new product, mappings of most multimodal metaphors in commercial launches are projected from function or property to product itself. (2) Multimodal metaphors in Apple’s New Product Launches tend to adopt product as the target domain and function or property as the source domain. If the source domain of a metaphor is function, the adoption of sub-entity tends to be human being. The product is embodied with human being’s ability, which is so magic that could persuade potential buyers and consumers. (3) The construction of multimodal metaphors in commercial launch, to some extent, could not be successful without oral language mode. What is more, most of the metaphors are rendered by two modes. (4) Various modes have their own functions in the interpretation of multimodal metaphor. Oral language mode, always revealing the mapping of the metaphors, plays a dominant role in constructing multimodal metaphors in the corpus, with written language mode, pictorial mode and non-verbal sound mode as a supplement and enrichment. Hence, the interplay of multifarious modes in the corpus could be complementary relation, to be specific, reinforcement.This thesis, with a meticulous exploration of multimodal metaphor, theoretically broadens the research of multimodal metaphor into a new dynamic multimodal discourse, and practically provides some instructional suggestions in enhancing the quality of commercial launches for the hosts and designers.