A Multimodal Metaphor Analysis Of No-tobacco Posters Based On Visual Grammar

Metaphors not only widely exist in human language, but become an essential part of image, sound, gesture and many other communication signs. Many scholars both at home and abroad have been committed to expanding the metaphor study which is formerly confined to the field of pure linguistics to multimodal metaphor, but as a new development in multimodal discourses, most of the studies on multimodal metaphor are carried out from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.In this thesis, visual grammar put forward by Kress & van Leeuwen and multimodal theory offered by Forceville et al. are taken as the basis to study multimodal metaphors in ten foreign no-tobacco posters designed for World No Tobacco Day by WHO and other countries, and these posters are selected according to the metaphors they adopt. And the following three questions are discussed on multimodal metaphors constructed in those posters:1) What are the types of multimodal metaphors showing up in no-tobacco posters? 2) What are the source domains usually adopted for those types of multimodal metaphors detectable in no-tobacco posters? 3) How can those types of multimodal metaphors in no-tobacco posters be constructed from the perspective of visual grammar? Finally, the following findings are concluded bessd on the multimodal metaphor depfinition developed by Forceville and the mapping-type-based classification given by Feng with a qualitative and descriptive method:1) Multimodal metaphors in no-tobacco posters can be divided into three types, multi-modal mapping, mono-modal mapping and cross-modal mapping, while mono-modal mapping being the majority, followed by cross-modal mapping and multi-modal mapping; 2) the source domains adopted by multimodal metaphors in no-tobacco posters include LIFE, BULLET, BUILDING, and PRISON; 3) the analysis of multimodal metaphor construction in no-tobacco posters can be conducted in three aspects, the representational meaning, interactive meaning and compositional meaning:for the representational meaning, multimodal metaphors are constructed through the action process and conceptual process, while for the interactive and compositional meaning, multimodal metaphors will be constructed based on two orientational metaphors: IMAGE-VIEWER RELATION IS CAMERA POSITIONING and INFORMATION VALUE IS SPATIAL POSITION.