A Study Of Multimodal Metaphor In Chinese Tobacco Advertisements

Cigarette is a kind of highly controversial product. On the one hand, it has created tax revenues of over one thousand billion yuan per year; on the other hand, eye-catching warnings such as "Smoking is harmful for healthy" are printed on the packages. After all, cigarette is a kind of commercial product, which needs to be recognized and purchased by its potential customers. Thus tobacco advertisements have turned up just for this reason. With the development of advertising techniques, Chinese cigarette companies spend huge amount of money on advertising their products. Chinese tobacco advertisements have evolved rapidly:from printed pictorial advertisements into dynamic video ones. The presentation of these advertisements is becoming more and more detailed with more and more implicit information included. Moreover, many creative fashionable factors have also been involved in this kind of advertisements because Chinese tobacco advertisements are expected to be accepted throughout the world. However, as a special product, tobacco is forbidden to be publicly advertised, and tobacco advertisements are allowed to publicize only at tobacco exclusive shops and the websites of tobacco companies. In order to intensify the effect of advertisements, more and more multimodal metaphors are used in Chinese tobacco advertisements along with the development of science and media.This thesis is aimed at offering a new sight of the working mechanism and construing of multimodal metaphor based on Charles Forceville’s pictorial metaphor and multimodal metaphor expression, Halliday’s conceptual metaphor and Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual design grammar theories.Altogether 40 Chinese tobacco video advertisements are collected as the research data. By classifying and analyzing the data, the mapping process from the source domain to the target domain is explored, and the cognitive activities of the audience are investigated.The findings of the study can be summarized as follows:1) Two or more kinds of metaphor are used in Chinese tobacco advertisements. Among these nine kinds of modal, the five used most frequently are music metaphor, image metaphor, written metaphor, oral metaphor, and sound metaphor, followed by smell metaphor, touch metaphor, and taste metaphor, while gesture metaphor has never been used in these Chinese tobacco advertisements.2) According to the themes, Chinese tobacco advertisements mainly cover five aspects:unpolluted tobacco plantations; images of red-wine, golf and successful men as signs of success; the tobacco companies, the processing of cigarettes, the high-tech equipment; Chinese cultural heritages; and poems.3) A new general model of multimodal metaphors is found in this thesis. And this model can provide a reasonable interpretation to the use of multimodal metaphors in Chinese tobacco advertisements.As the first study to explore multimodal metaphor in Chinese tobacco advertisements, this thesis may play a complementary role in interpreting the meanings and the construction of metaphors and enrich the existing theories of metaphor. It is also expected to provide some insights for advertisement designing and tobacco marketing.