Analysis Of Cognitive Multimodal Metaphors And Metonymy In The Corporate Publicity Videos On Huawei

Since the 1990 s,a group of scholars led by Forceville and Urios-Aparisi(2009)have began to pay attention to the research on multimodal metaphor and metonymy which are presented by the linguistic mode,pictorial mode,sound mode,music mode,etc.Publicity videos,which are a kind of dynamic discourse,have gradually become a hot spot in the study of multimodality due to its various modal representations and distinct themes.In recent years,multimodal studies at home mostly focus on national or city publicity videos,while the studies on thematic analysis of specific Chinese corporate publicity videos are very rare.Given this,this thesis selects two corporate publicity videos on Huawei as the corpora,whose theme is the growth of Huawei.In this thesis,both quantitative and qualitative research methods are adopted to analyze the multimodal metaphors and metonymies and their interaction in two corporate publicity videos on Huawei with the Blending Model of Multimodal Metaphor proposed by Zhao Xiufeng(2013)as the research tool.Through analyses,the results show:(1)There are five multimodal metaphors which can be classified into two types:Personification Metaphor and Growth Metaphor.The multimodal metaphors,which belong to the type of Personification Metaphor,are presented by the interaction of pictorial mode and linguistic mode.The multimodal metaphors,which belong to the type of Growth Metaphor,are presented by the interaction of three modes: pictorial,linguistic and sound.(2)There are three multimodal metonymies and they fall into two types: Causation ICM and Category-and-Property ICM.The multimodal metonymies that belong to the Causation ICM are represented by the combination of pictorial mode and sound mode.The multimodal metonymies belonging to Category-and-Property ICM are represented by the interaction of pictorial mode,linguistic mode and sound mode.(3)The frequency of multimodal metaphors is 62.5%,and the frequency of multimodal metonymies is 37.5%.In contrast,the former is used more frequently than the latter.This indicates that the former plays a more important role and is in a dominant position in corporate publicity videos on Huawei,while the latter is in a subordinate position.The dominant multimodal metaphors realize the projection from a concrete person to an abstract enterprise through the combination of Personification Metaphor and Growth Metaphor.This projection process enables people to cognize and understand the development and growth of Huawei in a more vivid way,thus better highlighting the theme of the publicity videos--the growth of Huawei.The subordinate multimodal metonymies,by activating part of the multimodal metaphors,help to highlight the narrative effect of the multimodal metaphors in corporate publicity videos on Huawei.(4)The interaction between multimodal metaphor and metonymy can achieve the best publicity effect as far as possible in the corporate publicity videos on Huawei.The interaction process is as follows.First,multimodal metonymies activate the target domain or source domain within some multimodal metaphors.Second,these activated multimodal metaphors,together with other metaphors directly presented by multimodal representation symbols,deliver richer information to the audience.Such interaction makes the theme of the growth of Huawei highlighted in the publicity videos more prominent and distinct,so as to achieve the best publicity effect as possible.Although this thesis has made a detailed analysis of corporate publicity videos on Huawei from the perspective of multimodal metaphor and metonymy,there are still some shortcomings,such as the incomplete collection of relevant corpora,which needs to be improved in future.