The Study Of Multimodal Metaphor And Its Attitudinal Meanings

Metaphor is not only lying in the linguistic signs,but exists in the forms of images,colors,sounds,gestures,even tactile and olfactory senses.In the late 1990s,a group of scholars,represented by Forceville,extended the study of metaphor from the pure linguistics of verbal symbols to the field of multi-modal researches.It is well known that few differences exist between the multi-modal metaphor and the metaphor in single linguistic mode,both of which occur in the conceptual metaphor system of human cognition.The only difference is lying in the ways of expression.Based on the theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics,Martin and White(2005)carried out a systemic classification for the evaluative resources in the discourse and proposed the Appraisal Theory.Feng Dezheng and Qi Yujie(2014)combined the Cognitive Appraisal Theory and the attitude system in the Linguistic Appraisal Theory and put forward a multi-modal framework for the analysis of attitudinal meanings.The early studies on metaphor are mostly confined to the studies of the conceptual metaphor within the single mode,especially the linguistic one.With the rapid development of multi-modal interaction and digital technology in recent years,the study of multi-modal metaphor has attracted more and more scholars' attention.Moreover,among the researches on appraisal meaning in the past two decades both at home and abroad,most of the scholars mainly focused on the linguistic text and gave little discussion on the appraisal meaning in the multimodal discourses.However,in the multi-modal discourses,sounds,features,expressions and gestures are all the important resources for the construction of evaluation significance.Therefore,it is also closely concerned by many scholars to extend the appraisal theory into the multi-modal discourse analysis.This thesis aims to study on the multimodal metaphor and its attitudinal meanings in the multimodal discourse of the movie Life of Pi,adopting cognitive linguistics and cognitive and linguistic appraisal theory as the theoretical background,using Forceville and E.Urios-Aparisi's multimodal metaphor theory as the basic analyzing framework,taking O'Halloran's(2004)multimodal filmic discourse analysis system as the tool,thus proposing a suitable multimodal framework for the whole analysis.The purpose of this study is to discuss the embodiment of metaphors in different models and their attitudinal meanings,to analyze the relationship between each modes,and to find the way in which the modes coordinate with each other in order to satisfy the expression of thematic meaning through the metaphors and its attitudinal meanings.The main findings are as follows.Firstly,multimodal metaphors are generated by the cooperation of various modes in the mapping process between the source domain and the target domain.By the analysis of forty multimodal metaphors in the film,the modes involved are mainly pictorial,linguistic and sonic ones.Among them,the PL?PLS mapping type accounts for the largest proportion.There is no metaphor that consists solely of sonic and linguistic modes.Secondly,in the process of representing multimodal metaphors in the film,some of them show dynamic characteristics.The initial state is different from the end state.In some multimodal metaphors,the origin domain is usually presented before the target domain.The pictorial mode is the most basic mode in the realization of the information in each domain while sonic mode is an essential mode in the target domain for the reason that varies sounds included can generate and stimulate potential meanings.Thirdly,multimodal metaphor and its attitudinal meanings play an important role in the plot description,image depicting and theme expression.In addition to the lexical items,the sonic mode and pictorial mode,such as the image position,facial expression,shooting angle,the background music,etc.can be the constituents of the trigger condition for the final attitude expression so as to produce the attitudinal meanings.In this thesis,the applicability of cognitive and linguistic appraisal theory in the multimodal research are verified to some extent.The study reveals the dynamic generation process of conceptual meaning,emotional effect and the appraisal meaning of multimodal metaphors,thus verifying the feasibility and applicability of metaphorical meaning co-construction among different modes in the filmic discourse analysis.Moreover,the thesis proves the significance of the meaning construction in the filmic discourse from the linguistic perspective so as to improve people's reading ability in the multimodal discourse and help achieve communicative purposes.