A Study On Multimodal Metaphors In Poverty Alleviation Cartoons From The Perspective Of Conceptual Blending Theory

Multimodal metaphor research is an important field of cognitive metaphor research.This thesis aims to enrich the genre scope of multimodal metaphor research and reveal the metaphorical connotation behind language use and multimodal representation by analyzing and interpreting multimodal metaphors in news cartoons.Based on the conceptual blending theory,this study applies multimodal metaphorical representation types of news cartoons and conceptual integration networks to analyze the multimodal metaphor phenomenon of 134 news cartoons on the theme of poverty alleviation from China News Cartoons,aiming to answer three questions: 1.What are the characteristics of the multimodal metaphorical representation in poverty alleviation cartoons? 2.How is meaning constructed in multimodal metaphors in poverty alleviation cartoons? 3.What do these cartoons reflect the cartoon creators’ attitude towards poverty alleviation?The research finds that: First,the characteristics of multimodal metaphorical representation in poverty alleviation cartoons mainly focus on mode arrangement and frequency of multimodal metaphorical representation.The frequency of multimodal metaphor representations in cartoons from high to low is PVM,P?M,V?M,PSM,PPM,?VM.Among all metaphorical representations,PVM is the most frequent and typical metaphorical representation.Second,based on the conceptual integration network,this paper chooses typical cartoons with metaphor scenarios and novel metaphors to analyze their meaning construction process in the input spaces,generic space,and blending space by employing single-scoped networks and double-scoped networks.Combined with cartoon images,text,or symbols,the process of meaning construction is refined through cross-domain mapping,frame and semantic projection,cognitive manipulation,and other processes,revealing the online cognitive process of the metaphorical meaning of cartoons and deepening the public’s understanding of metaphorical connotation in the cartoons.Third,the cartoonist’s attitude towards poverty alleviation is interpreted from the perspective of the identities of the cartoonists and his works.Both professional cartoonists and amateur cartoonists give high recognition and affirmation to the poverty alleviation work while showing great concern about the problems that arise in the process of poverty alleviation.Cartoon works fall into two types,complimentary cartoons and sarcastic cartoons.The number of works of complimentary cartoons in the professional group is slightly higher than that of the amateur group,and the number of works of sarcastic cartoons is greatly higher than that of the amateur group.Through the multimodal cognitive interpretation of poverty alleviation cartoons,it provides readers with new ideas for in-depth interpretation of cartoon context and improves their multiliteracy in the information age.