Cognitive Construction Of Chinese Culture At The Opening Ceremony Of The Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022 From The Perspective Of Multimodal Metaphor

The impressive development of science and technology has made great contribution to people’s diversified lives.Communication between people has gone beyond a single modality,which has involved images,music,gestures and other modalities to convey information and construct meaning.Therefore,the study of multimodal metaphor has become a hot topic in cognitive linguistics,which,nevertheless,still has limitations.In terms of research corpus,multimodal metaphor research mainly focuses on movies,advertisements and other videos,with the opening ceremony of large-scale live activities untouched.As the beginning of a grand event,the opening ceremony makes great difference to its success.The programs and designs in the opening ceremony are not so much simple performances as the connotation of them to the audience.However,most of the existing research on the opening ceremony is carried out from the perspective of culture and sports,rather than from that of cognitive linguistics.Therefore,this study takes the opening ceremony of the Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022 as the corpus to focus on the multimodal metaphors,and analyze the mapping mechanism of these metaphors as well as the meaning constructed by mapping.This study focuses on the video of the opening ceremony of 2 hours and 56 minutes,which includes 11 performance designs.Due to the long duration of the opening ceremony and the limited content observed in the video,the author exacts the most prominent and representative content in each performance as the subject matters for research.Based on the conceptual metaphor theory and multimodal metaphor theory,the author uses the literature research,induction,analysis and generalization to study the multimodal metaphor in the opening ceremony of the Olympic Winter Games Beijing2022,which mainly deals with the types of modality,their mapping mechanism and the meaning constructed in the opening ceremony.The following findings come from the study.Firstly,there are four modalities in the opening ceremony of the Olympic Winter Games,namely music,image,color and verbal language.Through the analysis of 11 performance designs in the opening ceremony,it was found that there were 8 music modality types,11 image modality types,4 color modality types,and 3verbal language modality types.It can be concluded that the first two account for a vast majority.Secondly,in the opening ceremony,the mapping mechanism of multimodal metaphor mainly has four forms,namely the mappings with music,images,color and verbal language as source domain respectively.Due to the dynamics and narrativity of multimodal metaphor,the cognitive model constructed is in the form of A-ING IS B-ING.The target domain mapped by metaphor is mostly related to Chinese culture and the theme of the Olympic Winter Games.Thirdly,all modalities are in close association with one another,including music and image interaction,music and color interaction,and image and color interaction.Different modalities are combined with each other to provide the audience with the most intuitive feeling and to construct more metaphorical meanings.At the opening ceremony,the Chinese traditional culture with a long history was carried forward through multimodal metaphor,which established the image of China as a great country with passion,openness,benevolence and tolerance to demonstrate China’s pursuit for national unity and world peace.The innovation of this study lies in the novelty of the research corpus.The multimodal metaphor study of the opening ceremony of the Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022 can provide new evidence for other studies on relevant fields as well as for the successful holding of the opening ceremony of large-scale events in the future.