A Cognitive Pragmatic Study Of Pictorial/Multimodal Metaphor In Political Cartoons

As a common language phenomenon, metaphor has been studied and discussedby many linguists home and abroad. From the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics,the idea that metaphor is not just functioning at the language surface as a figure ofspeech but is actually a way of thinking and action has been widely acknowledged.With further development of this line, Charles Forceville and many other scholarshave combined the study of cognitive linguistics and media studies and argued thatthe classic conceptual metaphor theory whose studies only focus on verbal metaphorcan not conclude that metaphor is not just a figure of speech but also a figure ofthought (Zhao Xiufeng&Su Huiyan,2010). Thus, they think that the classic theoryholds prejudice towards metaphors in other modes, i.e. the classic theory holds thatmeaning exists only in verbal signs. Hence, Forceville (1996,2009) together withother scholars proposed the concept of pictorial/multimodal metaphor, which expendsthe study of metaphor to a multimodal and cross-disciplinary scale. It should bementioned that pictorial metaphor is the theoretical basis which is indispensible in thedevelopment of multimodal metaphor theory. The new theoretical developmentprovides a brand new angle for the probation of the essence and application ofmetaphor. Beside the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics, the study of metaphor isalso done from the branch of Pragmatics, which can be found in works by Ortony(1979), Searle (1978), and Sperber&Wilson (1986/1995), etc. In Sperber&Wilson’sbook Relevance: Communication and Cognition, metaphor is only briefly discussedand no detailed discussion on how relevance theory explains metaphor was given bythem. Therefore,“there is bright development prospect in metaphor study from theperspective of Relevance Theory”(Yan Shiqing,2002).Political cartoons, as the data of this thesis, are rich in metaphorical concept andare expressed by both the verbal and pictorial mode. An integrative study ofpictorial/multimodal metaphor in political cartoons is conducted in this thesis fromthe perspective of Cognitive Pragmatic Linguistics by taking conceptual metaphor, pictorial/multimodal metaphor and Relevance Theory as its theoretical basis. Thepictorial/multimodal metaphor theory is used to identify metaphors and to explain theinterpretation mechanism, while relevance theory is used to explain the function ofcontext in the identification and interpretation of the metaphor in the political cartoonand its function in the perception of the communicative intention conveyed by thecartoonists through the metaphor. However, the two processes are not completelyindependent of each other and are supplementary to each other. Thus, this thesiscombines the two processes into an integrated model for the identification andinterpretation of pictorial/multimodal metaphor. In addition, the following researchquestions are answered in this thesis: How can the pictorial/multimodal metaphors inpolitical cartoons be identified? What is the interpretation mechanism ofpictorial/multimodal metaphor? How the informative and communicative intentionsof the political cartoons are conveyed through the interaction of the pictorial modeand the verbal mode?...