A Critical Multimodal Metaphtonymy Analysis Of The Front Covers Of The Economist

Metaphor is not only a pervasive linguistic phenomenon,but also an important cognitive tool in conceptualizing the world.Metaphor has been studied from different perspectives by scholars from different fields.Multimodal metaphor researchers believe that as a cognitive process,metaphor can be presented not only by verbal mode but also other modes like pictures,music and gestures.Critical metaphor scholars holds that as a linguistic phenomenon,metaphor is not neutral but a reflection of certain ideologies.Present studies on multimodal metaphor mainly deals with the way of presentation of metaphors,the ideologies of metaphor users are not considered.And critical metaphor analysis is restricted to metaphors in texts.Considering the gap between these two kinds of metaphor studies,this thesis tries to proposes a more comprehensive analytic method: multimodal critical metaphor analysis,which tries applying the analytic procedures of Critical Metaphor Analysis,namely,metaphor identification,metaphor interpretation,metaphor explanation,to multimodal metaphors.Metaphor identification means how to identify the conceptual metaphors based on pictorial presentations,such as images,colors,and verbal information provided by the discourse as well as background knowledge.In the metaphor interpretation process,the issue of which features have been mapped from the source domain to target domain in the mapping process will be addressed.Metaphor explanation means revealing the user’s communicative intention through exploring the ideological function of metaphors.This thesis takes the front covers of The Economist reporting America’s economy from 2006 to 2015 as the research object and the Critical Multimodal Metaphor Analysis as the analytic framework,and tries to answer the following three questions:(1)what conceptual metaphor have been used in the data?(2)which features have been mapped from the source domain to the target domain?(3)what ideological functions do these metaphors have?Through a detailed study of the data,it is found that lots of metonymies and metaphors,like animal metaphors,journey metaphors,natural phenomenon metaphors,human metaphors,object metaphors and spatial metaphors,have been used to describe the economic conditions of America.By projecting features like dangerous,show and be permeated with cracks of the source domain to the target domain,America’s economy has been described as stuck in crisis and problems,having slow down.Besides,these metaphors have certain ideological functions.They highlight the unfavorable aspects of America’s economy and the irresponsibility and ineffective of American government,thus cause worries about the economy and disaffection for the government among American citizens.And they also reflect the negative evaluation on America’s economy and government of The Economist.