A Study Of The Multimodal Metaphors In English And Chinese Advertisements Of Milk

Metaphor and advertisement are hot topics respectively in linguistics and advertising.Metaphor is not only very common in language use,but also important in cognition.Advertising is an effective means for sellers to promote sales and a good channel for consumers to know about goods.As an important strategy in advertising design process,metaphor can deliver much commodity information on the one hand,and it has the function of persuasion on the other.With the rapid development of science and information technologies,metaphors in advertising are no longer constrained to language,they have been expanded to other modes like sound,music and gesture.Nowadays,some linguists are keen on the researches of metaphors in advertisements,but most of which are limited to the print ads,and few of which focus on the analysis of metaphors in TV ads from a cognitive perspective.Based on the conceptual metaphor theory and the multimodal metaphor theory,this thesis uses the qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis to make a comparative study of multimodal metaphors in Chinese and English TV advertisements,and it explores the persuasive strategies applied in TV ads of milk.The research questions of this thesis are as follows:(1)How do the English and Chinese TV ads of milk construct the meaning of multimodal metaphors?And what are the similarities and differences of the two meaning construction processes?(2)What are the similarities and differences of the persuasive strategies applied in the English and Chinese TV advertisements of milk?The major findings of the thesis are the following:(1)The meanings of the multimodal metaphors in the selected English and Chinese TV ads of milk are constructed with the help of combination of verbal,sound and visual modes;(2)Metonymy plays an important role in the process of creating a new metaphor,which restricts the characteristics of metaphorical mapping and the choice of metaphorical attributes;(3)By a comparative study,multimodal metaphors in the Chinese and English TV ads of milk have 3 aspects of similarities and differences respectively.The three aspects of similarities are presented as follows:Firstly,the Chinese and English TV ads of milk tend to choose living creatures to be source domains of the multimodal metaphors;Secondly,metonymy plays a role in the meaning construction of multimodal metaphor in both Chinese and English TV ads of milk;Lastly,the target domains are basically presented by visual and verbal modes and the sound modes are seldom applied in both Chinese and English TV ads of milk.The three differences are summarized as:Firstly,the target domains in the multimodal metaphors of Chinese TV ads of milk are inclined to be product itself,while the target domains of English TV ads of milk tend to be animals;Secondly,the source domains of Chinese TV ads of milk tend to use various modes more frequently than the one of English TV ads of milk;Thirdly,the target domains in the multimodal metaphor of English TV ads of milk often come before the source domains compared with the situation of Chinese TV ads of milk.(4)Aristotle's persuasive strategies(pathos,ethos and logos)work in the Chinese and English TV ads of milk.