| According to emotional characteristics and development needs of young children,the Ministry of Education put forward that establishing a positive and stable,harmonious and happy emotional environment is one of the important goals of preschool children's emotional health education in the Guidelines for Learning and Development of Children 3-6 Years officially issued on October 9,2012.Emotive education requires adapting various appropriate ways to develop children's ability to understand and treat emotions correctly,learn to control and express their emotions appropriately.However,children's emotion picture books,as a crucial carrier of emotional education,help children to familiarize themselves with the abstract meaning of specific emotions,increase their emotional knowledge,and guide them to correctly understand and regulate emotional states by presenting stories of certain emotional states.Nevertheless,emotion picture books,for the most part,use metaphors to reduce the abstraction of emotional concepts so as to make them concretization,categorization,and clarification and be perceived.The analysis and interpretation of emotion metaphors in children's emotion picture books would benefit to improving children's ability of emotion recognition,mastery and empathy,and further the development of children's cognitive ability.This research selects 25 authoritative children's emotion picture books(target age from three to six)as the research subjects.According to metaphor identification procedures(MIPs)of Pragglejaz Group(2007)and emotion classification method of Shaver et al.(2001),the emotion metaphors in children's emotion picture books are identified and classified from a cognitive perspective.With the help of the latest multimedia data analysis software Nvivo 12,the screened data needs to be imported,edited,coded,created nodes to mark and counted.Meanwhile,the present research,under the guidance of cognitive metaphor theories: conceptual metaphor,multimodal metaphor,emotion metaphor,pictorial metaphor,metonymy,and relevance theory from the perspective of pragmatics,pays its attention to the meaning construction of picture-text representation of emotion metaphors in children's emotion picture books to explore the cognitive function of information transmission by both quantitative andqualitative data analyses,and mainly focuses on the following research questions:(1)What are the types,ratios and features of emotion metaphors in children's emotion picture books?(2)How do different types of emotion metaphors construct metaphorical meaning in children's emotion picture books?(3)What are the cognitive functions of emotion metaphors in children's emotion picture books?The major findings in line with the three research questions are shown as follows:(1)Based on the types of emotions involved and the mapping features of emotion metaphors,the emotion metaphors in children's emotion picture books mainly can be divided into three categories and six types.The first category is negative emotion metaphor,accounting for the largest proportion 67.16%,which includes three types:anger metaphor(33.58%),fear metaphor(14.60%),sadness metaphor(18.98%).And positive emotion metaphor contains happiness metaphor(15.33%)and love metaphor(11.68%).The third category is neutral emotion metaphor,taking the ration of 5.83%.Additionally,five major types of multimodal emotion metaphorical representations are summarized from the children's emotion picture books,which are source domain:pictorial mode – target domain: verbal mode(24.09%),source domain: pictorial mode –target domain: verbal and pictorial mode(14.60%),source domain: verbal and pictorial mode – target domain: verbal and pictorial mode(10.95%),source domain: verbal and pictorial mode – target domain: verbal mode(4.53%),source domain: implicit – target domain: verbal and pictorial mode(5.83%).It can be seen that pictorial mode,verbal mode,verbal and pictorial mode are the three main modes of emotion metaphorical representations in children's emotion picture books.What's more,51.82% of the metaphorical mapping of emotion metaphors involves metonymy.The cause of emotions represents the emotions(CAUSE OF EMOTION FOR THE EMOTION)and the consequence of emotions symbolizes the emotions(EFFECT OF EMOTION FOR THE EMOTION)are two common causation metonymic forms.Among them,physical signs representing emotions is the most frequently used forms of vision.(2)Although the metaphorical meaning construction of emotion metaphors in children's emotion picture books has its own emphasis,it is mainly through the physical signs,sensory effects,orientation dynamics and entity presentation that closes to the reality to intuitively represent the source domain.To name only a few,“red face”represents “anger”,“blue” means “sadness”,“up off the ground” stands for “happiness”,and “hidden enemy” hints “fear”.For children readers,the key to understanding different emotion metaphors lies in fully mobilizing their encyclopedic knowledge and experience,combining with the characteristics of graphics,to find the similarity between the source domain and the target domain.(3)Emotion metaphors in children's emotion picture books have narrative function,social function and aesthetic function.The narrative function interprets the cause,process and result of emotion production mainly through the similarity and relevance between picture presentation and text description so as to convey emotional knowledge better.Social function consists of communicative function and empathic function,and the correct use of communicative function and the reasonable performance of empathic function are conducive to the improvement of individual emotional intelligence.Aesthetic function should not be underestimated: one is that different emotions use different color metaphors to highlight their unique characteristics,another is that emotion metaphors in children's emotion picture books bring fresh visual experience to cultivate the reader's aesthetic qualities.On the whole,based on previous theoretical results,this study not only broadens the scope of emotion metaphor research,but further confirms the feasibility of conceptual metaphor,especially multimodal metaphor,in interpreting different text corpus,which is of great significance to consolidate the text research of cognitive metaphor theory.The interpretation of the multimodal representation of emotion metaphors in children's emotion picture books not only provides an appropriate entry point for children's readers to understand the abstract emotional concept,but also provides a certain reference in using emotion picture books for emotional teaching better.And it also offers some inspirations for the design of this genre. |
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