A Cognitive Study On Multimodal Metaphor In Urban Jungle Of Hidden Kingdoms

Conceptual Metaphor Theory(CMT)has over the past three decades amply sought to underpin the claim that humans’ so frequent use of verbal metaphor indicates that they think largely metaphorically and metaphor is a way of thought and action.If this claim of CMT is reasonable,metaphor should manifest itself not only in language,but also in other modes,such as pictures,sounds and music.Nowadays,science and technology develop rapidly and the way people convey information has been changed a lot from the only verbal mode to multimodal manifestations.As a result,it is inevitable to study metaphor in multimodal manifestations.However,multimodal metaphor has been far less extensively studied than its verbal sister.Moreover the research into multimodal metaphor from the cognitive perspective mainly focuses on advertisements,cartoons and films.The dynamic meaning construction of multimodal metaphor in documentaries is rarely touched upon.So this study analyzes the dynamic meaning construction of the multimodal metaphors in the documentary Urban Jungle of Hidden Kingdoms based on CMT proposed by Lakoff and Johnson.The research questions are as follows:1.What are the types of the multimodal metaphors in the documentary Urban Jungle of Hidden Kingdoms?2.What is the meaning construction process of the multimodal metaphors from the cognitive perspective?The study adopts both the quantitative method and the qualitative method through the procedures of description,interpretation and discussion to solve the research questions.The findings of this study are as follows.First,as to the the types of the multimodal metaphors in the documentary,there are three types of mulitmodal metaphor in the documentary based on the classification of conceptual metaphor proposed by Lakoff and Johnson,namely multimodal ontological metaphor,multimodal structural metaphor and multimodal orientational metpahor.Multimodal ontological metaphor occupies the largest part and multimodal orientaitonal metaphor occupies the smallest part.Multimodal ontological metaphors are mainly person metaphors,entity metaphors and container metaphors.Multimodal structural metaphors are mainly home metaphors,fight metaphors and journey metaphor.Multimodal orientational metaphors are up metaphor and in metaphor.Second,as to the meaning construction process of the multimodal metaphors in the documentary,it is based on the working mechanism and the characteristics of conceptual metaphor.The meaning construction process of the multimodal metaphors is as follows.The source domain and the target domain of a multimodal metaphor are identified first.Then the modes used in both conceptual domains are given.At last the features that are mapped from the source domain to the target domain are described.Thus the mapping from the source domain to the target domain is established and the meaning of a multimodal metaphor is constructed.The multimodal metaphors are elaborated through a complex interaction of different modes.The verbal mode elucidates the pictorial mode.And the sound mode can help to create a proper atmosphere to intensify the effects made by the verbal mode and the pictorial mode.In this study the multimodal metaphors in the documentary Urban Jungle of Hidden Kingdoms are interpreted from the cognitive perspective.The study is of theoretical and practical significance and it will provide implications for CMT,the research into multimodal metaphor and the production of documentaries.