A Cognitive Study Of Pictorial-verbal Metonymies And Metaphors In Chinese Anti-corruption Cartoons

At present a few studies offer a large-scale multimodal corpus of pictorial-verbal metonymies and metaphors in the genre of Chinese political cartoons.Therefore,this thesis aims to investigate pictorial-verbal metonymies and metaphors from the perspective of their uses in transmitting specialized concepts conducted in Chinese anti-corruption cartoons,which consists chiefly of a corpus of 130 cartoons that are collected from the comic anthology authored by ZHANG Zhigao.This thesis addresses the following specific three research questions:(1)What are modal configurations in Chinese anti-corruption cartoons?(2)How are pictorial-verbal metonymies and metaphors constructed the themes of Chinese anti-corruption accordingly?(3)What are functions of the pictorial-verbal metonymies and metaphors?This thesis mainly finds that:(1)Four modal configurations are observed:cross-modal mapping,multimodal mapping,implied mapping and mono-mapping;(2)Pictorial-verbal metonymies are rooted in six conceptual metonymies: DEFINING PROPERTY FOR CATEGORY,PART OF THE THING FOR THE WHOLE THING,INSTRUMENT FOR ACTION,SIGN FOR CONCEPT,OBJECT FOR CONCEPT and OBJECT FOR RELEVANT PEOPLE,and then pictorial-verbal metaphors are mainly grounded in three conceptual metaphors: HIGH LEVEL THING/ATTRIBUTE IS LOW LEVEL THING/ATTRIBUTE,ABSTRACT CONCEPT IS CONCRETE OBJECT and ACTION IS THE EXERTION OF FORCE;(3)Pictorial-verbal metonymies and metaphors perform the argumentative function and political communicative function.This thesis not only extends the application of multimodal metonymy and metaphor theory to the context of the Chinese anti-corruption,but also contributes to the refinement of the theory.Finally,this thesis promotes the mainstream value of combating corruption and upholding integrity.