A Comparative Study Of Multimodal Metaphorical Representations Of Editorial Cartoons In People's Daily And New York Times

This thesis selects the latest editorial cartoons from the official website of People's Daily and New York Times as the corpus with the aim of contrasting the metaphorical representations of the editorial cartoons of the two newspapers and concurrently expanding metaphorical researches from the verbal mode to the non-verbal mode.Based on the theoretical foundations of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Multimodal Metaphor Theory,the present study adopts the combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods.The contrastive results indicate that there are quite a few similarities and dissimilarities of the mode configuration patterns of editorial cartoons between People's Daily and New York Times.To begin with,editorial cartoons in People's Daily and New York Times share four major mode configuration patterns: cross-modal mapping,monomodal mapping,multimodal mapping and implied mapping.Additionally,among the four major mode configuration patterns,cross-modal mapping accounts for the highest percentage no matter in People's Daily or in New York Times.Cross-modal mapping is predominantly used in People's Daily,namely,50.8%,while both cross-modal mapping and monomodal mapping,33.1% and 30.7% respectively,are predominantly identified in New York Times.Moreover,the average number of metaphors contained in each cartoon in People's Daily is larger than that in New York Times.This thesis is of theoretical significance as well as of practical importance.For one thing,this study provides more substantial evidence and further confirms the feasibility and explanatory power of multimodal metaphor.For another,this research sheds light upon the creation by cartoonists and news industry both at home and abroad and also provides some insights to viewer on how to distill the critical stance of the cartoon for a full interpretation.