A Study Of The City Image Construction In City Publicity Films Based On Multimodal Metaphors And Metonymies

As two basic ways of human thinking and behavior,metaphor and metonymy have been focused on the verbal mode for a long time.And then Forceville brings the multimodal perspective to the study of metaphor and metonymy,holding the opinion that metaphors should not only exist in language but also in other modes such as images,music,gestures,taste and so on.A city image publicity film is such kind of a multimodal means rich in metaphors and metonymies.It is a marketing “advertising” that uses videos to locate a city image and combine the external image and internal culture of a city for the artistic expression of a city as a brand.Many cities in recent years use publicity films to promote themselves.This thesis analyzed the construction of city images displayed in the publicity films of different levels of cities through an analysis of multimodal metaphors and metonymies.The selected corpus was made up of six publicity films for six cities at three levels,with two cities for each level.This thesis addressed the following three research questions: 1)How do the publicity films of cities at different levels use multimodal metaphors and metonymies to construct their images? What are the similarities and differences among them? 2)What are the city images reflected under the framework of multimodal metaphor and metonymy?The major findings of the study are as follows.Firstly,the city elements of different modes in the city publicity film,especially the picture mode and the verbal mode,are combined with multimodal metaphor and metonymy to construct a variety of city images.The metaphors and shooting methods adopted in the construction of city images in city publicity films of different levels of cities are very similar.Secondly,there are also similarities in the city images constructed by the same level of city publicity films,and most of them construct city images from the aspects of history,humanities and innovation.Thirdly,different levels of cities also have differences in the production of city publicity films.Higher-level cities employ more modern elements,thus the image of the city will be more modern but weak in focus.Lowerlevel cities tend to focus on historic and cultural aspects.Meanwhile this thesis put forward some suggestions for the future development of the publicity film,which can better promote the city and attract more people’s attention.