Meaning Construction Of Multimodal Metaphors In Traffic Safety TV Advertisements

Metaphor is not only a linguistic phenomenon,but also a reflection of thinking mode and cognitive mechanism,and language is just one of the means to realize metaphor.With the development of technology,the study of metaphor can not be confined to the linguistic level in a multi-media era,and metaphor exists in image,color,music and many other areas.For a long time,the metaphor in advertisements is one of the most popular research objects,but most of the studies focus on the verbal language mode or image mode,while little has been done in multiple modes.Public service advertisements are of great importance to convey social consciousness and maintain social morality,at the same time,they're good examples to study multiple modes.Hence,the study of multimodal metaphor in public service advertisements is of theoretical and practical significance.This thesis takes traffic safety advertisements as the linguistic data,and a small corpus is built based on the collected advertisements.It aims to explore the meaning construction of multimodal metaphor with qualitative and quantitative methods.Besides,the function of each mode and factors affecting the process of meaning construction will be analyzed.The major findings are as follows:Firstly,multimodal metaphor connects some features of the well-known and contagious things to the target domain with the help of mapping so that the target domain can be perceived easily.Different from the conceptual metaphor,multimodal metaphor realizes its representation by using multiple modes,including image mode,verbal language mode,color mode and so on.Secondly,there are 78 multimodal metaphors in the self-built corpus.The top three modes used in manifesting source domain are the image mode(92.3%),verbal language mode(30.8%)and spoken language mode(16.7%)while the top three ones used in manifesting target domain are image mode(56.4%),verbal language mode(52.6%)and sound mode(38.4%).The other modes are less frequently used.Each mode has its own function and they complement and reinforce each other.Thirdly,the meaning construction of multimodal metaphor is affected by cognition,emotion and culture.