A Multimodal Metaphorical Study Of The Opening Ceremony Of The G20 Hangzhou Summit

In recent years,with the rapid development of information technology,people have tended to utilize multimodal means of communication increasingly.The modalities such as images,sounds,music and gestures,interact and cooperate with each other,contributing to the information transfer and meaning construction.Therefore,the research on multimodal metaphor has been extensive and intensive gradually,with various genres of discourse and domains concerned.Nevertheless,there are still many limitations in these studies,which have paid less attention to the grand modality-abundant live events so far.As the prelude of an event,the opening ceremony plays a significant role in boosting morale,publicizing culture and promoting communication.With the development of technology,the modes of presentation and the modalities to convey meanings in the opening ceremony have become more diversified,which display great research values.However,the current studies of the opening ceremony still have many limitations.Foremost,in terms of the research perspective,most of the studies are confined to such views as journalism and communication,history as well as physical education,scarcely concerned with multimodal metaphor from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.Besides,in terms of the research material,relevant studies concentrate more on the opening ceremony of grand sports events symbolized by the Olympic Games rather than political and economic activities such as G20 Summit.As a result,taking the opening ceremony of G20 Hangzhou Summit in 2016 as corpus,this thesis conducts a detailed analysis of the multimodal metaphors within.G20 Hangzhou Summit is an outdoor symphony concert reaching down to the water by West Lake.This concert,directed by Zhang Yimou,consists of nine art performances,with the duration up to 53 minutes and 16 seconds.Through the analysis of the video of the opening ceremony,this article aims to answer the following questions,with the purpose of providing references for holding opening ceremonies of grand events:(1)What dominant modalities are involved in the opening ceremony of G20 Hangzhou Summit?(2)Within each type of modality,what multimodal metaphors are constructed?In these metaphors,how are source domains and target domains presented?In the mappings from source domains to target domains,what role does the metonymy play?(3)Among the different types of modalities,how do various source domains interact with each other?Through these cross-domain interactions,what metaphorical meanings does the discourse try to construct?Based on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Multimodal Metaphor Theory,this thesis attempts to utilize qualitative method to conduct a detailed analysis of multimodal metaphors in the opening ceremony of G20 Hangzhou Summit.With the preface and nine musical performances as ten cases,this article does case studies to discuss the main modalities,metaphorical mappings as well as cross-domain interactions of source domains within each case.After the elaboration,the conclusions are drawn as follows.(1)In the opening ceremony of G20 Hangzhou Summit,there are four types of modalities in general,which are music,images,colors and verbal language.They are of vital importance in studying the metaphorical meanings.(2)There are numerous multimodal metaphors in this corpus,most source domains of which are specific and distributed in the four modalities above.Nevertheless,the target domains are either concrete or abstract,which are closely related to Chinese culture and the theme of this summit.Furthermore,in the mapping to the abstract ones,metonymy acts as a crucial mediation.(3)The modalities of source domains are closely related,and they complement and cooperate with each other to construct metaphorical meanings.Through the cross-domain interaction,this discourse constructs the traditional Chinese culture,the image of Chinese(patriotic,diligent,friendly,noble-minded,tolerant,pursuing love and harmony)and the theme of the summit(Building an Innovative?Invigorated,Interconnected and Inclusive World Economy).The current thesis further proves the universality and enlarges the research domains of Multimodal Metaphor Theory,which offers a new evidence for the future related studies.In the meantime,it helps to provide useful references for holding opening ceremonies of grand events in the future.