A Study Of Multimodal Metaphors In Public Service Advertisements (PSAs) Of Waterprotection

Inspired by Conceptual Metaphor Theory(CMT), Forceville,the representative of multimodal metaphor study, has noticed that non-verbal modes such as picture, color, and sound can also realize metaphorical representation and participate in the construction of metaphorical meaning. He expanded the scope of metaphor study from pure verbal texts to multimodal discourses, thus making multimodal metaphor study a new orientation of metaphor study.This thesis, based on the latest research results of CMT and multimodal metaphor theory, is mainly a qualitative research of 90 water protection public service advertisements(PSAs) collected from the official website of China Environmental Protection Foundation. The major types of metaphorical representation in water protection PSAs are summarized and the underlying cognitive motivation and the regularities of multimodal metaphors in the genre are analyzed. At the same time, the thesis discusses the distinctive features of multimodal metaphors and the role of cultural elements in multimodal metaphorical meaning of water protection PSAs. The aim of the thesis is to help enhance readers’ understanding of multimodal discourses in the information era and further arouse the public awareness of environmental protection.The study shows that firstly there are mainly six types of multimodal metaphorical representation in water protection PSAs, including pictorial mode-verbal mode, pictorial mode-verbal and pictorial mode, verbal and pictorial mode-verbal and pictorial mode, verbal and pictorial mode-verbal mode,verbal and pictorial mode-pictorial mode, implicit-verbal and pictorial mode. Pictorial mode-verbal mode is one of the most typical types and has the largest number of examples. Secondly, these representation types show a series of regularities: 1) obviously, among the six multimodal representation types, the source domain or target domain of four types include verbal mode or pictorial mode. That’s to say, verbal mode or pictorial mode are the main modes in water protection PSAs. 2) Compared with single mode mapping, cross-domain mapping appears with a higher frequency in this type of advertisement. As metaphor and metonymy run through the six representation types, it’s better to classify the mapping process to “Metaphtonymy” proposed by Goossens(1990). 3) There are two kinds of metaphorical expressions: mapping from concrete to abstract and mapping from concrete to concrete. Pictorial mode-verbal mode &verbal and pictorial mode-verbal mode are the mapping types of concrete to abstract and the other four types are mapping from concrete to concrete. Finally, this study finds that cultural factors play an important role in the interpretation and understanding of multimodal metaphorical meaning of water protection PSAs. In turn, multimodal metaphors could also reflect the characteristics of different cultures to some extent. For example, designers of PSAs integrate Chinese characters into metaphors, which reflects the unique characteristics of Chinese culture and makes the metaphors more lively and ingenious so as to achieve good promotion effects.This study enriches the genre category of multimodal metaphor study, and to some degree it verifies the usability of related theories of conceptual metaphor and multimodal metaphor. Meanwhile it inspires the designers of PSAs in their designing process. Admittedly, there still exists some limitations in this thesis. For example,it mainly focuses on 90 water protection PSAs and the sample size is still small; The author did not give an in-depth analysis and discussion of the deep interaction between multimodal metaphor and metonymy.