A Study Of Multimodal Metaphor In Water Protection Public Service Advertisements

Metaphor plays a very important role in the realization of the persuasive function of public service advertisements,and it attracts more and more attention.In recent years,more and more people have studied metaphors in public service advertisements,such as traffic safety public service advertisements and anti-smoking public service advertisements.However,there are relatively few studies on public service advertisements for water resources protection.Most of these studies are concerned with the construction of the meaning of the representation of multimodal metaphor,and seldom involve the mapping types of multimodal metaphor.Therefore,the purpose of this study is to explore the modality of multimodal metaphor in water protection public service advertisements,the mapping types of multimodal metaphor and how to realize the persuasive function of multimodal metaphor.Based on Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory,Blake’s interaction theory of metaphor and Feng Dezheng’s classification of word-image metaphor,this paper uses qualitative method to study the multimodal metaphor in water resources protection public service advertisements.The study can be divided into two stages: the identification of multimodal metaphor and the interpretation of multimodal metaphor.In the identification stage of multimodal metaphor,according to Forceville’s three criteria of identifying multimodal metaphor,the source domain and target domain of multimodal metaphor in each water protection public service advertisement,as well as the various modes presenting the source domain and the target domain,are identified respectively.In the interpretation stage of multimodal metaphor,this paper mainly analyses the mapping process of multimodal metaphor from source domain to target domain in public service advertisements under the interaction of multimode.The corpora selected in this paper are 60 print water protection public service advertisements and 14 video water protection public service advertisements with the main theme of water resources pollution and waste.Print public service advertisements are from www.baidu.com and http://cn.bing.com/ and https://www.sogou.com/.Video public service advertisements are downloaded from the following three video websites: http://www.iqiyi.com/,http://www.youku.com/,and https://v.qq.com/.For video water protection public service advertisements,this paper uses Hyper snap to capture video clips containing multimodal metaphors or construct multimodal metaphors together.First,there are four modes in water protection public service advertisements with multimodal metaphor: pictorial mode,written mode,sounds and gesture mode.Among the four modes,pictorial mode and written mode appear more frequently,and gesture mode is the least.There are four main relationships among these modes: interdependence,language modes are dominant,non-language modes are dominant,and complement each other.The interrelation of these modes promotes the formation of multimodal metaphor.Second,the mapping types of multimodal metaphors in water protection public service advertisements include cross-modal mapping,mono-mapping and multimodal mapping.Finally,this paper illustrates the persuasive function of multimodal metaphor in water protection public service advertisements from five aspects of metaphor: the similarity of shape between source domain and target domain,the similarity of function between source domain and target domain,brevity,rhetoric function and emotional stimulation.