A Research On Multimodal Metaphor In Economic Cartoons From The Perspective Of Visual Grammar

As information science and technology develops rapidly,the traditional language is no longer the only way of communication.More and more media such as image,sound and gesture transmit messages and exchange ideas in the same way.Metaphors are pervasive everywhere in our daily life,and thus the multimodal metaphor has been brought into focus.Although the multimodal metaphor has become a hot topic for research,the previous studies mostly paid attention to TV advertisements,political cartoons,editorial cartoons and so forth.Rather than following the trodden path,this thesis focuses on the multimodal metaphor in economic cartoons.Collected from The Economist as corpus are 92 economic cartoons,which are published from January 2015 to April 2016.This thesis attempts to study the multimodal metaphor in economic cartoons from the perspective of visual grammar with the aim to answer research questions in Chapter Three.This Thesis explores the genre features of economic cartoons and elaborates on the embodiment of representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning of visual grammar in economic cartoons.In addition,it studies the realization of metaphorical mapping in economic cartoons.Through the qualitative analysis,the research has obtained findings as follows: Firstly,the interpretation of economic cartoon cannot be separated from readers’ encyclopedic and contextual knowledge.Conventional symbols frequently occur in economic cartoons,and they are metonymic in nature,which requires readers to identify and understand the conventionalized metonymy.Secondly,in terms of representational meaning,narrative representation takes up a higher percentage than conceptual representation in the collected data.Interactive meaning and compositional meaning are constructed by camera positioning and spatial position respectively.The relation formed by words and images is coincident with visual grammar.Lastly,the source domain in economic cartoons is mainly represented by pictorial mode,and the target domain is represented through mapping or verbal mode.The image producer always states the theme and expresses his attitude or intention by means of cartoons.