A Cognitive Study Of Metaphors In Disney Animated Films

Since the 1990 s,metaphor research,as an core component of cognitive linguistics,has been the subject of intense scholarly debate in linguistic research.Looking back on the history of metaphor for two thousand years,it has been studied in rhetoric,philosophy,linguistics,cognitive psychology and other fields to varying degrees,and left a remarkable impression.A large number of famous masterpieces emerged at the historic moment.Since the birth of Metaphor We Live By in 1980,the study of metaphor from the perspective of cognition has stepped onto the historical stage of modern linguistics.One of the greatest contributions of Lakoff's and Johnson's works,as a symbol of the trans-era study of metaphor,is to find that metaphor is a ubiquitous and indispensable tool in the process of human's cognition of the world,rather than merely regarded as a rhetorical phenomenon.At present,with the introduction of conceptual metaphor theory and its further development,metaphor has got rid of the shackles of traditional rhetoric,as well as received different degrees of attention and research in various academic fields.Although the terminology used in different directions is different,it is generally accepted that metaphor is the core component of cognitive science.According to Lakoff and Johnson's theory,metaphor universality exists in human daily life,not only at the linguistic level,but also in human thinking to guide human beings,and plays a fundamental role in organizing people's ideological concepts.Theories show that conceptual metaphor is a cross-domain mapping from a concrete and well-known source domain to an abstract and unknown target domain.Because of the different cultural background and experience,the receivers acquire different perceptions.Therefore,the theory of cultural metaphor has been developed constructively.Conceptual metaphor can be divided into three categories: structural metaphor,orientational metaphor and ontological metaphor.Ontological metaphor includes entity and substance metaphor,container metaphor and personification.Structural metaphor is defined as one concept is metaphorically structured in terms of another(Lakoff & Johnson,1980),which allows us to go beyond orientation and referring and gives us possibility to metaphorically structure one concept that are abstract,diffuse and lack clear delineation according to another structured and concrete concept.Orientational metaphor is the one that does not structure one concept in terms of another but instead organizes a whole system of concepts with respect to one another … since most of them have to do with spatial orientation: up-down,in-out,front-back,on-off,deep-shallow,central-peripheral.(Lakoff,Johnson.1980).Ontological metaphor means human experiences with physical objects enable us to view abstract concepts and experiences as entities and substances(Lakoff,Johnson).Ontological metaphor also includes:Entity and substance metaphors: Regarding experience as entity or substance,and to understand the former through the latter,we can make a corresponding material description of experience,so as to bring with it the characteristics of a certain object.Container Metaphor: Think of non-containers(things,actions,horizons,events,ideas,etc.that are not containers)as containers,so that they have boundaries,quantifiable,which can be soft and hard,can be inside and outside.The personification metaphor is to further refine objects into human beings and endow them with human characteristics.The Walt Disney Company started with Mickey Mouse's animation in the 1930 s,and began to enter the field of live-action movies in the 1940 s,creating many "first" movies in the history of film.Now it has become the main export camp of American culture,leaving an important mark in the childhood of the children' around the world.As an animated film,its lines and plots contain rich metaphors.However,from the perspective of metaphor,there are some deficiencies in the systematic analysis of the works of metaphorical cognition in a specific Disney animated film.Previous research on Disney animated films focused on the development of Disney Company,animation modeling,animation production and so on.Among them,the in-depth study based onZootopia is relatively lacked.Based on the theory of metaphor,this paper studies the intuitive and non-intuitive metaphors in Zootopia by combining qualitative analysis with quantitative analysis.It mainly answers the following questions:(1)How can metaphorical discourse in Zootopia be embodied in conceptual metaphors?(2)How to analyse Zootopia by usingcultural metaphor?The study finds that from the surface language level,conceptual metaphor theory can be used to analyze the corpus of Zootopia,which is based on 43766 words in English.Through Audio-video based transcription,the conceptual metaphor of 19 lines in the movie is analyzed.Accordingly the conceptual metaphors in Zootopia can be divided into the following types: structural metaphors,orientational metaphors and ontological metaphors.Ontological metaphors can also contains entity and substance metaphors,container metaphors and personification metaphors.The research summarizes and analyses the corpus respectively.In addition,the theory of cultural metaphor is applicable to the interpretation of the film from a non-intuitive and deep-seated perspective.To some extent,this study not only improves the Disney animation film research,but also has a certain practical significance.Firstly,the research results of this paper can provide some reference for the metaphorical cognitive research of Zootopia and other works of Disney Company.Second,this study of cultural metaphors in Zootopia will help to improve the cultural ability of Chinese English learners,and understand the cultural symbols in the film even American cultural.Otherwise,it can help Chinese students make better use of cultural background knowledge to improve their language skills in daily communication.At the same time,through the analysis of both internal and external cognitive perspectives,it provides new ideas for future researchers,that is,metaphor is a linguistic phenomenon,but language is only the surface of metaphor.Metaphor contains rich cultural content,values,artistic techniques and so on,which are worthy of in-depth exploration and research.Finally,this study will help to improve people's language skills in practical communication,help English learners take English culture as their learning background,penetrate into the language,and achieve their communicative.Using idioms with conceptual metaphors in communication or presentations can help English learners achieve social goals better.However,this paper is only a preliminary study of metaphors in Disney animated films.Unfortunately,although the author has made great efforts in the research process,due to various factors,such as the constraints of scientific research capacity and time,the study inevitably has shortcomings.Firstly,this paper only analyses the lines and part of pictures of Zootopia.In fact,the features of metaphor can be seen in many aspects this animation,such as construction of character identity,visual effects,composition and so on.At the same time,due to the lack of theoretical expression of some examples in the collected data.For example,personification is a theory put forward by Lakoff,but it has only been touched upon in his works,and has not been clearly elaborated.Therefore,some languages in this article are lack of absolute authority.Secondly,this paper only takes metaphor in Zootopia as the object of research,and does not involve other Disney animated movies.While striving for in-depth study,it is unavoidable to neglect the comprehensiveness of the study.Finally,in order to facilitate the further study of metaphor in Disney animated films,the author puts forward two suggestions: First,to make a more systematic metaphorical discourse analysis of a single Disney animated film.Secondly,research tools should be used to conduct a scientific multi-modal metaphor study of Disney animated films.