Rhetorical Analysis Of Multimodal Metonymy In Video Advertisements Of Consumer Electronic Products

In the field of linguistics,perspectives of metonymy research gradually diversify.The definition of metonymy extends from a rhetorical trope to a method of world cognition.As different perspectives of analysis,researches on metonymy from cognition and rhetoric can be combined.Critical Metonymy Analysis(CMA)identifies metonymy from the cognition perspective,and analyzes it according to the rhetorical criticism,which can reveal metonymy's surface features and rhetorical meanings.At present,most researches on CMA focus on plain text discourses such as political speeches and news.With the development of industry of consumer electronic products,video advertising becomes an important promotion method.Metonymy cases in these advertisements can be research objects of rhetorical analysis.Hence metonymy cases in video advertisements by Apple,Huawei and Google are collected as research objects,and Critical Multimodal Metonymy Analysis(CMMA)is created to analyze rhetorical meanings in these metonymy cases.CMMA contains three processes,including multimodal metonymy description,interpretation and evaluation.Multimodal metonymy description focuses and reveals surface features of metonymy,like classification and multimodality.Multimodal metonymy interpretation analyzes rhetorical situation and motives,and employ ratios to analyze realization of the motives,which focuses on the conveyance of the rhetorical meanings.Multimodal metonymy evaluation assesses the metonymy according to certain criteria and analyzes employment of identification in the metonymy,which focuses on the acceptance of the rhetorical meanings.On metonymy description,obvious facial features exist in the collected metonymy cases.All the 67 metonymy cases are classified into 10 categories,and 38 cases concentratively distribute in Control ICM,Causation ICM and Event ICM.In all the cases,total amounts of modalities in two domains are similar,while the amount of metonymy cases with pictorial modality in the vehicle domain is 1.6 times of that in the target domain;and the amount of metonymy cases with verbal modalityin the target domain is 2.3 times of that in the vehicle domain.Different modalities in two domains have different functions.And there are 19 kinds of multimodality transcription formulas of the metonymy cases,which are scattered.On metonymy interpretation,rhetorical situation of these metonymy cases is“commercial advertising” as a marketing platform,under which there are two rhetorical motives.88.06% of the collected metonymy cases take “Recommending one company's own product” as the rhetorical motive,which employ ratios like“Agency-X”.The Agency refers to “Using the recommended product of the company”,and these ratios emphasize positive effects brought from this positive Agency to the audience.And 11.94% of the collected metonymy cases take“Criticizing one company's competitor's product” as the rhetorical motive,ratios of which emphasize the negative effects brought to the audience by a negative Agency.On metonymy evaluation,in the metonymy evaluation criteria,collected multimodal metonymy cases meet the truth,artistic,ethical and textual criteria well.In identification employment,identification by sympathy appears in 94.03% of all the metonymy cases,which introduces product advantage and meets audience's need;identification by inaccuracy appears in 62.69% of all the metonymy cases,which blurs boundary between product property and user ability;and identification by antithesis only appears in 26.87% of all the metonymy cases,which together with audience stands against competitor's unqualified products.Different identification strategies need to be employed in combinations like “SAI” “SA” and “SI”,and only identification by sympathy can appear alone.All the processes in CMMA together reveal the rhetorical meanings in the collected multimodal metonymy cases,display the spreading processes of these rhetorical meanings,and extend the scope of research objects of CMA.In addition,this thesis can provide guidance for metonymy choices in future video advertisements and helps the audiences interpret these advertisements comprehensively so that they can make rational purchase choices.