A Comparative Study Of Multimodal Metaphors In Chinese And English "Anti-Smoking" Advertisements

With the rapid development of modern technology,China has entered the digital information age.Under this background,the communication of people is also increasingly diverse.Communication not only involves language mode,but also involves the combination of words and images even more modes to transfer information.Thinking habits and appreciation ability of human beings are changing under the shock of the new visual culture.Multimodal discourse gradually arouses more people's concern.Research subject is changing from only words research to the combination of a variety of modes including languages,images,colors,and sounds,which breaks research limitations of pure study on single mode.In the past,metaphor has always been regarded as a kind of literary rhetoric.However,metaphor has been not only a linguistic phenomenon but also a way of thinking and cognition since George Lakoff and Mark Johnson put forward that metaphor exists in our daily life.The study of metaphor also has changed from a single language category into the study of the text,picture,sound and other semiotics.Multimodal metaphor research mainly involves advertising,political cartoons,movies,language teaching and other fields.It aims to represent the multimodal metaphorical meaning construction by analyzing the languages,images,sound and other symbols of working together.Based on the multimodal metaphorical theory,the thesis takes the Chinese and English “anti-smoking” public service ads as the research subject,and analyzes the similarities and differences between them from the two perspectives of mapping ways and metaphor types.Moreover,the author explores the reasons for the similarities and differences from the cognition angle,mainly from the way of thinking,the physiological basis and experience philosophy three aspects to explain the reasonsleading to same multimodal metaphor of "anti-smoking" public service ads as well as from regional culture,social system and ideology of openness to explain the reasons leading to the difference of multimodal metaphor between Chinese and English "anti-smoking" advertising.So this thesis not only provides a new perspective to understand the “anti-smoking” advertisements,but also gives the advertisement designers more inspiration to design more high-quality advertisements so as to warn smokers the danger of smoking and encourage them to take actions to give up smoking as soon as possible.