Cognitive Analysis Of Multimodal Metaphor

Metaphor, as a way of thinking and cognition, is pervasive in our language,thought, action as well as daily life. Throughout the history of linguistic research,scholars generally agree that the study of metaphor has experienced two historical leaps: one is to move forward from the classical rhetoric view to modern conceptual thinking; the other is to move forward from conceptual metaphor to non-verbal and multimodal metaphor. Driven by the development of the interdisciplinary research and multimodal discourse analysis, verbal metaphor study has been pushed further onwards from linguistic approach to the scope of multimodal studies since the 1990’s,which has attracted more and more linguists’ attention.Due to its co-occurrence of image, verbal text and auditory modes and extensive utilization of metaphors, public service advertising, with the aim to maintain social morality and improve public social consciousness, serves as ideal research corpus in the present thesis. This thesis adopts qualitative research method, choosing TV public service advertisements(PSAs) related to the theme “Harmony of a Family”, captioned“Speak out Your Love” and “Thanksgiving Parents” as materials for analysis. On the basis of Conceptual Metaphor Theory(CMT) and the theory of multimodal metaphor put forward by Forceville, this thesis, through the analysis of the verbal elements and non-verbal elements of multimodal metaphor, attempts to address the following four questions:(1) How do audience respectively identify and construct the two domains(source domain and target domain) and the cross-domain mapping in TV PSAs?(2)How many modalities are involved in the chosen TV PSAs? How do these modalities cooperate with each other to contribute to the meaning construction in multimodal metaphors?(3) How do metonymies and multimodal metaphors interact in PSAs?(4)Is the multimodal metaphor theory applicable and feasible for the explanation of dynamic features of TV PSAs?The findings of the study are summarized as follows:(1) The similarities between two entities, especially perceptual resemblances, can be useful to help audience identify and interpret the source domain and the target domain of multimodal metaphors as well as the cross-domain mapping.(2) The identification and interpretation process of multimodal metaphor in which three modalities(visual,verbal and aural mode) are blended together to collaboratively function in themeaning construction of the public service advertisements.(3) Metonymy provides a precondition for multimodal metaphor, while the latter provides a restriction to the choice of features mapping in the former.(4) It is further proved that CMT and multimodal metaphor put forward by Forceville possess a strong applicability and feasibility in analyzing dynamic public service advertisements. The present thesis enriches the study of multimodal metaphor in the dynamic television public service advertisements both theoretically and practically.