| At the end of the 20th century,with the rapid development of digital information and the widespread popularity of multimodal interaction modes,research on metaphor has also extended from the traditional pure language field to the multimodal field.The collection of papers by Forceville and Urios-Aparisi marks that multimodal metaphor has become a new direction in the recent development of cognitive linguistics.Its research object has also expanded from a single text metaphor to the multimodal metaphor,one of the most studied genres are news cartoons.Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic in December 2019,it has become a social and public health event that has been continuously focused on around the world.In addition to written reports,the China News Comics Network hosted by China Daily,the national news media of China,has also launched a solicitation campaign on COVID-19 comics.From the perspective of cognitive linguistics,this paper,based on multimodal metaphor theory,takes COVID-19 news cartoons as the corpus,uses qualitative research methods and interpretation of specific cases,selects typical metaphor construction types and main representation modes of multimodal metaphor to analyze its meaning construction and people’s cognitive mechanism.Based on the above research process,this study mainly explores the distribution and frequency of multimodal metaphor construction types and the representation modes of multimodal metaphor,as well as people’s cognitive mechanism reflected in COVID-19 news cartoons.The findings of the thesis are as follows:(1)There are four main construction types of multimodal metaphor in COVID-19 news cartoons: verbal-pictorial metaphor,contextual metaphor,hybrid metaphor and target domain implicit metaphor,and among them,verbal-pictorial metaphor and target domain implicit metaphor account for a large proportion,accounting for 57% and 18%,which are the main mapping methods of COVID-19 news cartoons.And then the contextual metaphor,accounting for 16 % of the total,and the least hybrid metaphor,accounting for 9%.Without the function of description of words,the meaning of contextual metaphor and hybrid metaphor is more open,leaving readers more space for interpretation.(2)The representation modes of COVID-19 news cartoons mainly focus on four target domains of novel coronavirus,medical staff and bad social phenomena and national polices and measures.However,the interpretation of comics is a dynamic online machining process.These target domains combine to form a large number of metaphor scenarios.Through the metaphor scenarios of confrontation between the two sides,the tense atmosphere is rendered,and the criticism is directed at the virus side,reflecting the firm position and attitude of the “we” side.Among them,metaphor scenario with the themes of “eliminating viruses” and “fighting against viruses” account for the largest proportion of comic materials.These metaphor scenarios stimulate people’s common experiences,such as the basic understanding of war.(3)It can be seen from the source domain corresponding to the target domain in multimodal metaphor that the representation mode of multimodal metaphor has a cognitive universality,which reflects the cognitive law of human thinking from specific to abstract,from easy to difficult,and the combination of static and dynamic.It also highlights the sociality and contextual relevance of news cartoons.Through in-depth research on multimodal metaphor in COVID-19 news cartoons,this thesis is beneficial to help people understand the multimodal metaphor phenomenon,explore the attitude of cartoonists and the country towards the social event of the COVID-19 epidemic,and deepen the public’s understanding of the event.To a certain extent,this study also contributes to the enrichment of multimodal metaphor theory. |
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