An Analysis Of Multimodal Metaphors In Public Secrutiy Warning Cartoons

Public security warning cartoons are widespread in social media,books,magazines and on public occasions because of their vivid and warning features.They aim at revealing certain security issues so as to warn the public.The previous studies mostly make static description of public security warning cartoons based on their educational value,without independent and closed data bank as research foundation.Moreover,there are few researchers focusing on the public security topics from the perspective of multimodal metaphor.On the strength of Multimodal Metaphor Theory,this thesis will do a deep research on multimodal metaphors in the public security warning cartoons.Having established a closed data bank with 153 pieces of public security warning cartoons downloaded from the website http://cartoon.chinadaily.com.cn,this thesis will perform quantitative and qualitative analysis on data,which is mainly around two major themes: 1.Are there any multimodal metaphors in the collected public security cartoons? If so,what are specific multimodal metaphor types and cartoon themes in the corpus? 2.How are the themes of public security warning constructed by the multimodal metaphors obtained from the collected public security warning cartoons? The research is expected to bridge the gaps of previous studies.The major findings of the research are as follows:(1)By analyzing the data bank of collected public security cartoons one by one,multimodal metaphors are confirmed in it.On the basis of analyzing the collected public security warning cartoon data,there are 153 multimodal metaphors,substantiating the claim that public security warning cartoons are a metaphor-rich genre.Multimodal metaphors in public security warning cartoons fall into four major types: pictorial-verbal metaphors,pictorial-indexical metaphors,pictorial-iconic metaphors and pictorial-verbal-iconic metaphors.Pictorial-verbal metaphors account for 80.4%,pictorial-verbal-iconic metaphors account for 11.1%,pictorial-indexical metaphors account for 6.5%,pictorial-iconic metaphors account for 2.0%.The findings provide strong evidence for the view that in terms of cartoons,picture and words are two major carriers of expressing meaning.To some extent,it increases the previous controversial multimodal metaphor classification methods.In the meanwhile,according to cartoon themes,the data is classified into different types at the macro level.The result showed that these cartoons are centered around four themes,that is: SECURITY REGULATIONS AND MEASURES,PUBLIC SSECURITY THREATS,PUBLIC SECURITY PARTICIPANTS and SECURITY EDUCATION.SECURITY REGULATIONS AND MEASURES topic accounts for 37.25%,PUBLIC SSECURITY THREATS topic accounts for 15.0%,PUBLIC SECURITY PARTICIPANTS topic accounts for 15.7%,SECURITY EDUCATION topic accounts for 12.4%,and other discursive topics account for 19.6%,which reflects that security regulations and measures play an important part in maintaining public security.(2)On the strength of Multimodal Metaphor Theory,the thesis elaborates on the forming process of multimodal metaphors and reveals the process of the meaning construction of mutimodal metaphors.The 153 pieces of multimodal metaphors in the data bank are based on the two major metaphorical systems respectively: the Great-Chain-of-Being metaphors and the Event Structure metaphors,that is,HIGHER LEVEL THING IS ON THE TOP OF LOWER LEVEL THING,SITUATION IS LOCATION,CHANGE IS DISPLACEMENT and MOTIVATION IS FORCE.Besides,based on the two major metaphors,the present research applies the strategy of “self-legitimization” and “the other-delegitimization” to the 153 multimodal metaphors in the data bank respectively.They are together to achieve the construction of public security warning theme.The findings provide a strong proof for the view that metaphor not only is a kind of rhetoric,but also a thinking tool and cognitive way that humans learn about the world.The thesis employs the Multimodal Metaphor Theory to analyze the public security warning cartoons,classifying the multimodal metaphor types in those cartoons and cartoons themes,explaining the construction of public security warning themes.This thesis contributes to describing the current situation of social public security and problems that the society is facing from the perspective of multimodal metaphor,so as to attract social attention on public security theme from the perspective of linguistics.What’s more,the thesis helps to increase the previous multimodal metaphor classification methods in static multimodal context,expecting to offer possible reference for the multimodal metaphor classification methods and extend the theoretical tension of the Multimodal Metaphor Theory.