A Cognitive Study Of Multimodal Metonymy In Print Public Service Advertisements

As a typical multimodal discourse,print public service advertisements(PPSAs)frequently use multimodal metonymy to seek public interests and improve welfare treatment.However,in the current multimodal studies of PPSAs,metaphor studies account for the majority.Metonymy studies mainly exist as an adjunct to metaphor studies,and specialized metonymy studies are rarely seen.This thesis discusses and analyzes multimodal metonymy in PPSAs from the perspective of cognitive linguistics,using conceptual metonymy theory as a theoretical framework.This study builds a corpus and randomly selects 100 PPSAs with text and images from the Internet.Adopting a research procedure of identification,interpretation,and explanation,this research attempts to scrutinize multimodal metonymy in PPSAs from four dimensions: cognitive mechanism,representation,pragmatic factors,and pragmatic functions.The research found that: firstly,widely existing in PPSAs,the high-frequency multimodal metonymic patterns are INDIVIDUAL FOR COLLECTION,ACTION/ EVENT/PROCESS FOR STATE,PART FOR WHOLE,SUBEVENT FOR COMPLEX EVENT,and ENTITY FOR CHARACTERISTIC.The use of metonymic chains and metaphtonymy is pervasive,constituting a typical feature of PPSAs.Secondly,two multimodal metonymy representations predominate: one is that the vehicle is presented in image mode,and the target is implicit;the other is that the vehicle is presented in image mode,and the target is presented in text mode.Image and text modes complement each other and collaboratively participate in the meaning construction of multimodal metonymy.Finally,the primary constraints on understanding multimodal metonymy are discourse context,encyclopedic knowledge,and cultural context.Moreover,the main functions of multimodal metonymy include representational function,highlighting function,and rhetorical function.