The Meaning Construction Of Multimodal Metaphor In Commercial Printed Advertisement

With the development of multimodality in people's communication,more and more scholars have extended the representations of metaphors to non-language modalities such as music,images etc.Multimodal metaphor reflects the interdisciplinary and multimodal development in metaphor research and expands the research field of multimodal discourse analysis.Companies use images and texts in advertisements to convey the value of products to potential consumers with the aim to stimulate consumption.The multimodal metaphor in advertisements greatly enriches the communicative effects of advertisements.The image carries the meaning of the product,which is the most direct expression of the advertisement conveying to the potential consumer.The target domain of multimodal metaphor in commercial printed advertisements is the image and the source domain is the text.Therefore,the primary task of multimodal metaphor is to identify the pictorial metaphor.In advertisements,the text is used as an auxiliary tool to make the image more specific,and the combination of the two modalities makes the communicative effects of advertising more prominent.In advertisements,images are processed to give the product of imagination and conception.Metaphors are used to convey the selling point to audiences.As an auxiliary tool,text enhances the meaning of image.Therefore,this thesis attempts to construct pictorial metaphor based on the representation meaning of visual grammar,and explores the cross-modal mapping between text and image,and finally completes the meaning construction of multimodal metaphor.The author selected 20 commercial printed advertisements from two famous websites,adopted qualitative research and reached to the following conclusions: in commercial printed advertisements,representing meaning can construct pictorial metaphor in multimodal metaphor.Among them,in the narrative process,the replacement of conventional elements(participants,processes and circumstances)can construct images.In the conceptual process,with the help of the three processes: classificational,analytical and symbolic,the construction of image can be achieved through symmetry of the composition,the addition and substitution of the whole-part and symbolic attributes.In addition,the text has two main functions on the image:(1)text anchors image,pointing the image to the target meaning;(2)text illustrate image,to maximize the supplement and enhance the image meaning.These two functions further determine the cross-modal mapping of “text(source domain)-image(target domain)”,highlights the features of the products and finally complete the meaning construction of multimodal metaphor.This thesis attempts to explore the meaning construction of the multimodal metaphor from a new perspective,which has broadened the research of multimodal metaphor to some extent.The thesis hopes to help companies pay more attention to the presentations of image and text when designing advertisements.When constructing an image,it is possible to perform processing modifications to the image such as compositional symmetry,whole-part addition and replacement and symbolic attributes.In addition,the thesis also hopes to help potential consumers fully understand the intentions of the company's commercial printed advertisements,and help the consumers understand the selling points of the products better.