A Cognitive And Functional Study Of Verbal-pictorial Metaphor In TIME

The relentless march of science and technology has a significant impact on the way of communication in modern society,and the metaphor that normally appears in linguistic form expands to the scope of multimodal metaphor.Therefore,verbal-pictorial metaphor has aroused the interest of many scholars in recent years.The researches at home and abroad are mainly based on cognitive linguistics which can only interpret the meaning of verbal-pictorial metaphor partially.Though a few researches study the interaction between pictures and verbal texts from the perspective of cognition and function,they ignore the meaning of pictures and verbal texts in constructing verbal-pictorial metaphor and lack a comparatively complete and systemic analysis model.This study attempts to integrate Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Grammar of Visual Design by virtue of Conceptual Blending Theory to deduce and set up the cognitive-functional perspective analysis model whose feasibility will be tested by analyzing verbal-pictorial metaphors in TIME.The structure of the proposed model in this study is based on Conceptual Blending Theory which reveals dynamic meaning construction of verbal-pictorial metaphor.Considering the features of verbal-pictorial metaphor as study subject and the advantages of different theories,Conceptual Metaphor Theory is employed in this study to explain conceptual metaphor in linguistic form and Grammar of Visual Design is also adopted to analyze the three meta-functions of picture because the visual mode has to serve representational and communicational requirements as a full system of communication.Specifically speaking,the proposed model contains two conceptual integration networks,corresponding to two phases.In the first phase,Conceptual Metaphor Theory explains the meaning of conceptual metaphor in the verbal mode of verbal-pictorial metaphor while Grammar of Visual Design analyzes the representational meaning and interactive meaning of the picture of verbal-pictorial metaphor.Then the meanings of verbal mode and picture are combined by Conceptual Blending Theory to gain the metaphorical meaning set up by the verbal-pictorial metaphor.In order to integrate verbal text and picture together to form a meaningful whole,the composition of verbal-pictorial metaphor needs analyzing.Thus,the metaphorical meaning set up in the first phase and the compositional meaning are integrated in the second phase for the whole meaning of verbal-pictorial metaphor.Through deducing and establishing the cognitive-functional perspective analysis model,this study chooses three different types of verbal-pictorial metaphors in TIME in 2006 and some findings are reached at.1)The meaning of verbal-pictorial metaphor is a meaningful whole which can not be fully explained by one single perspective.Thus,a study form cognitive and functional perspectives is needed for the complete and systemic analysis of the meaning of verbal-pictorial metaphor;2)The cognitive-functional perspective analysis model analyzes the metaphorical meaning and compositional meaning of verbal-pictorial metaphor systematically and comprehensively.The two integration networks in the model highlight the emergent meaning of verbal-pictorial metaphor compared with linguistic metaphor.This model also shows the feasibility and possibility of integrating cognitive theories and functional theories on the operational level;3)Through case studies,it is found that different types of verbal-pictorial metaphors decide the variable contents of the parts in the integration network,which proves that the cognitive-functional perspective analysis model has strong explanatory power on the meaning analysis of verbal-pictorial metaphor.However,it should be noticed that the cognitive-functional perspective analysis model is aimed at analyzing the meaning of verbal-pictorial metaphor and some multimedia data like sound and video are not be presented in the thesis.Due to the limited resource and the limitations of research time and research scope,this study only chooses three cases in TIME in 2006,which will influence the reliability of the study.Finally,the cognitive-functional perspective analysis model established in the present study is a tentative and general model on operational level and still needs theoretical foundation as guidance,which will make the study of verbal-pictorial metaphor,and even multimodal metaphor,more convincing.