Meaning Construction Of Multimodal Metaphors In News Cartoons On Targeted Poverty Alleviation

The book Metaphors We Live By published in 1980 ushers in a new era to metaphorical studies in cognitive linguistics.Not just a rhetorical device,metaphor is a cognitive tool for human beings to perceive and conceptualize the world.With the information era developing and thriving,in order to further prove the conceptual nature of metaphors,non-verbal and multimodal representations of metaphors have attracted scholars' attention.Recent years have also witnessed a rapid growth in multimodal metaphor studies in a variety of genres home and abroad.This thesis pinpoints on the meaning construction of multimodal metaphors in news cartoons on “Targeted Poverty Alleviation” with the theoretical background of Multimodal Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Blending Theory.Based on a corpus of200 cartoons downloaded from the website,newscartoon.com.cn,this study attempts to identify and categorize metaphors in the collected cartoons,and give an account for the mode configuration patterns,together with explaining the meaning construction from the perspective of Conceptual Blending Theory.The research also aims to find out the function of different modes in constructing meaning and the implications conveyed behind the cartoons.The findings are as follows:Under the topic of “Targeted Poverty Alleviation”,the collected cartoons are classified into three categories: “poverty”,“poverty alleviation measure”,“rules violations”.The metaphors belonging to each category are divided into several sub-sections.The multimodal metaphors related to “poverty” mainly include POVERTY IS AN OBSTACLE,POVERTY IS A DISPENSABLE OBJECT.In the second category,MEASURE IS A TOOL,accounts 29%,this suggests more about the attitudes and ideology of the institution carrying out these measures.Among these cartoons,the third category includes “corruption” and “deception”;related metaphorstake a large proportion which explicitly criticizes the behaviors in the news cartoons.Within metaphor itself,the modes distribution,mapping process and meaning construction are detailed discussed.The modes mainly include pictorial mode and verbal mode.A large proportion of metaphors are in line with the pattern: PVM.The picture and the language interact with each other to construct meaning.The second common type is the P?M,in which the verbal mode is absent.The mapping process and meaning construction are closely associated,for mapping process is an essential step in constructing meaning,and conceptual blending is complementary to the mapping process.The detailed analyses of meaning construction of the cartoons reveal the implications conveyed beyond pictures.Behind the cartoons,information is suggested in many aspects,from which we can read the attitudes of Chinese and the government.Firstly,a great number of the poor lives on farm work in the countryside,who wants to “throw the hat” and determines to be lifted out of poverty and live a better life.Chinese is determined to fight against poverty,showing our confidence and insistence towards alleviating poverty.All the cartoons suggest that the government bears no tolerance towards these violating behaviors.Via the analyses and discussions of the multimodal metaphor,the study helps sort out the metaphors in the collected cartoons on “Targeted Poverty Alleviation”.It provides evidence for the claim of the conceptual nature of metaphor in verbal and pictorial mode and also extends the application of multimodal metaphor theory to a Chinese context and contributes to the refinement of the theory.