A Study On China’s National Image In The Story Of China From The Perspective Of Multimodal Metaphor And Metonymy

The national image is the card of a nation and an important part of a country’s soft power.It can reflect the history,culture,national spirit and values of the nation.The documentary is an important way to establish,propagandize and enhance the national image in international communication.The British Broadcasting Corporation(BBC)is one of the largest news broadcasting companies in the world.The documentaries produced by the BBC enjoy high popularity and wide reputation in the world.It is of great practical significance to study the China’s national image in these documentaries.At present,the researches on multi-modal metaphor and metonymy at home and abroad mainly focus on the analysis of the genres like advertisements and political cartoons,while little attention is paid to the meaning construction of multimodal metaphor and metonymy in dynamic documentary genres.The author chooses the first episode of the documentary The Story of China produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation as the corpus text to study the interaction between metaphor and metonymy,and analyze the national image in this documentary.Based on the theoretical framework of multimodal metaphor and metonymy,this thesis uses ELAN,a linguistic analysis software,to annotate the multimodal metaphor and metonymy involved in establishing the national image in the documentary.The following three questions are to be answered: What are the main types of multimodal metaphors and metonymies in The Story of China? How do the multimodal metaphors and metonymies in The Story of China achieve the meaning construction? What kind of China’s national image is shown in The Story of China? The study found that: firstly,based on the classification of conceptual metaphors proposed by Lakoff and Johnson(1980),the multimodal metaphors in the documentary can be divided into three categories: 37 multimodal ontological metaphors,23 multimodal structural metaphors and 4 multimodal orientational metaphors.Multimodal ontological metaphors mainly include personification and entity metaphors;multimodal structural metaphors mainly include “harmony is coexistence” metaphors and journey metaphors;while multimodal orientational metaphors are mainly “up is good” metaphors.Based on the classificationof metonymy by Radden and Kovecses(1999),there are 10 part-part metonymies,and 25whole-part metonymies in this documentary.Secondly,the documentary mainly includes four modes: text,image,music and color.It realizes the co-construction of meaning through multimodal metaphor,multimodal metonymy and the working mechanism and characteristics of the interaction theory of metaphor and metonymy.Thirdly,The Story of China conveys the image of China as a great power through the above multimodal metaphors and metonymies that China is a harmonious and confident country with a diverse,profound and long history.The study of meaning construction of multimodal metaphor and metonymy belongs to the category of cognitive linguistics,which involves the complex interaction among various modes.This kind of research is still in its infancy.This thesis explores the meaning construction of multimodal metaphor and metonymy in the genre of dynamic documentaries,and provides a new perspective for the study of China’s national image.The author hopes to have an opportunity to further study the meaning construction of multimodal metaphor and metonymy in the future.