A Cognitive Analysis Of Multimodal Metaphors In Chinese Auto Print Advertisements

With the rapid development of multimedia technology and economy, people tend to apply various manifestation forms to the communicative activities. Such modalities as language, pictures, sound, colors, and gestures all play critical roles in the process. Thus it has become an inescapable trend to conduct studies on multimodal discourses.The conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), put forward by Lakoff & Johnson (1980), has long sought to verify the claim that metaphor is more considered as a matter of thought rather than a figure of speech. It can be found not only in characters but also in many other modalities. Therefore, the emergence of multimodal metaphor breaks the limitations in previous studies which focus on purely verbal metaphor.In order to stimulate potential consumers' purchasing motivation, the advertisers often utilize various modalities to deliver some positive information of their products. Thus advertisements are definitely good samples for multimodal metaphor researches. However, previous researches on auto print advertisements exclusively focus on verbal metaphors or pictorial metaphors; few are carried out at the multimodal level.. By virtue of the conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) and studies of multimodal metaphor, four Chinese auto print advertisements are selected out as the research samples, and then the multimodal metaphors in these advertisements are analyzed in details, including modality classification, the mapping process, and the interaction of modalities. The findings obtained are shown as follows:1) Characters, color and image are major types of modality and play an essential role in the comprehensive interpretation of multimodal metaphors underlying Chinese auto print advertisements.2) Several mapping processes can simultaneously be conducted in an auto print advertisement, and the source domains more often than not complement or contrast with each other to co-construct the metaphorical meanings.3) As a result of the influence of the specific genre, the features mapped from the source to the target domains in Chinese auto print advertisements are always positive ones which have close relation with the product promoted.The present study further proves the applicability and effectiveness of the CMT and related studies of multimodal metaphor, which creates a perspective for the future researches in this field. In the meantime, it provides a useful reference for the development and perfection of the innovative design concerning auto print advertisements.