A Cognitive Study Of Verbal-Visual Metaphors In"AVATAR"

With the rapid development of science and technology, the Internet is used extensively, and the discourses are becoming multimodal gradually. Information transmission is not through the mono-modal text but through the vivid way of the combination of pictures, sound and other different modalities. Therefore, the studies on metaphors are not confined to the text literally, but extended to other different modalities. The verbal-visual metaphors are presented by the synergy of images and texts, in another word, the source domain and target domain of metaphors are presented by images and texts together.As a kind of special discourse, movie discourse could transfer the plots of the movie, cultural connotation and potential entailment which are acquired by audience through decoding the "compound words"--the combination of pictures and words. The study takes Fauconnier’s Conceptual Blending Theory as the theoretical foundation to analyze the verbal-visual metaphors in "AVATAR" from the cognitive perspective. On the basis of brief introduction to the definition, development, features and application of verbal-visual metaphors, this paper divides verbal-visual metaphors in "AVATAR" into three categories according to composition patterns. They are partial verbal-visual metaphors, paralleled verbal-visual metaphors, blended verbal-visual metaphors. This thesis focuses on exploring the operating mechanism of the movie verbal-visual metaphors on the guidance of Conceptual Blending Theory. The operation of verbal-visual metaphors is based on the objective and subjective similarities between the source domain and the target domain. In the operating process of metaphors, the interaction of image meaning and literal meaning processed by audiences’thinking maps from the source domain to the target domain to form an integrated new concept, as a result, metaphors generate. The operating results reflect three major themes of "ecological","colonization" and "love" in UA VATAR" The research has a great significance in theory and practice. Firstly, it studies the metaphor by combining the texts and pictures from a brand-new perspective. More attention is given to metaphors’characteristics and dynamic construction process. Secondly, through a deep analysis of the film discourse, this research tries to broaden the traditional field of verbal analysis to multimodal analysis and enhances the understanding of the essence of verbal-visual metaphors as well as metaphors in its broad sense. Thirdly, it validates the strong applicability and practicality of the cognitive linguistics theory. Fourthly, this research provides a more reasonable perspective of film appreciation by analyzing the integrated effects of different modalities and ultimately exerts a positive influence on helping people’s comprehension of the themes in "A VATAR"...