A Study Of Multimodal Metaphors In English Commercials From The Perspective Of Conceptual Metaphor Theory

With the development of multimedia era,the application of multimodal research has become a hot topic,and extensive researches on multimodal metaphors have been conducted.English commercials are rich and varied,which contain a lot of metaphors.Based on the coordination among various modalities,characteristics of commodities are expressed accurately.Currently,most scholars focus on print advertisements or one specific commercial to study multimodal metaphors,and seldom systematically explore multimodal metaphors in English commercials based on data.In this background,from the perspective of conceptual metaphor theory,this thesis explores types and meaning construction process of multimodal metaphors in English commercials,and analyzes their characteristics,which would enrich research results in this field.This study firstly reviews previous related researches,and introduces the definition,classification and characteristics of conceptual metaphor theory and multimodal metaphor theory.Secondly,the data related to multimodal metaphors are collected by using Internet resources.In terms of content,this study focuses on types of commercials in different commodity fields mainly in English language.Cognitively,the definition of multimodal metaphor in a broad sense is used for identifying multimodal metaphors,and commercials containing multimodal metaphors are selected.As a result,a total of 60 qualified English commercials are obtained and 65 metaphors are sorted out from them.Thirdly,according to content characteristics and different mapping methods respectively,some typical English commercials are selected.Descriptive research method is used to analyze the meaning construction process of different types of multimodal metaphors.Thus,based on the data,content characteristics of multimodal metaphors are summarized and illustrated through observation and case analysis.Finally,after the data are processed,statistical analysis method is used to reveal representational characteristics of multimodal metaphors,thus revealing the relationship between the nature of the source domain and the target domain and modal configuration method,which has implications for predicting the development trend of English commercials in the future.It is found that,from the perspective of content,both conventional metaphor and novel metaphor exist,but most of them are novel metaphors,which are characterized by novelty,symbolism and openness.From the perspective of representation,multimodal metaphors based on different modal configuration methods are all distributed.The number of multi-modal mapping is the largest.Combining the nature of two conceptual domains,“Concrete is concrete” is the most common,followed by “Concrete is abstract”.The nature of source domain and target domain also has an impact on the selection of specific modal configuration method.In addition,it is also found out that in the process of meaning construction of multimodal metaphors,different modalities cooperate with each other,mainly based on visual modality,using image symbols and text symbols to express main information;in auditory modality,background music is used to render the atmosphere and enhance the advertising effect.