| With the rapid development of information technology and multimedia,the way people convey information is no longer limited to verbal representation,but extends to multimodal discourse including text,picture,sound and so on.Forceville(1996,2009)and some other scholars make researches on pictorial metaphor firstly and then propose the theory of multimodal metaphor on the previous basis,extending the conceptual metaphor researches from language area to multimodal area.Until now,many scholars have done researches on pictorial metaphor and multimodal metaphor aiming at varieties of genres(advertising,cartoon,gesture and so on),and research contents are various,such as the examination of conceptual metaphor theory in non-verbal area,the operation mechanism of multimodal metaphor and the relationship between multimodal metaphor and metonymy.But most of these studies are case studies conducted from one perspective,functional or cognitive.Analytical angle is single and the reliability is low.Therefore,it is necessary to analyze visual metaphor from cognitive-pragmatic perspective by corpus-based approach.According with the new trend of cognitive pragmatic research,the thesis can help expand multimodal metaphor researches and improve research reliability.Relying on visual symbols,print advertising is a communication means persuading consumers to buy products or service through pictures and words.It conveys intentions metaphorically,resorting to people’s multimodal perception ability.In the field of advertising,beverage alcohol advertising plays a vital role because of the development of economy and the growth of people’s living standard.So taking conceptual metaphor theory and multimodal metaphor theory from cognitive perspective,and relevance theory from pragmatic perspective as the theoretical basis,the thesis makes a comprehensive study of visual metaphors in print beverage alcohol advertisements,aiming to answer the following three questions:(1)What are the ratios and features of visual metaphor types in print beverage alcohol advertising?(2)How are the meanings of different types of visual metaphors constructed in print beverage alcohol advertising?(3)What are the cognitive pragmatic functions of visual metaphors in print beverage alcohol advertising?The thesis chooses ninety print beverage alcohol advertisements of famous brands randomly to build corpus,and takes MIP(Pragglejaz Group,2007),classifications of visual metaphors put forward by Forceville(2008)and Zhao Xiufeng(2010)as framework to identify and classify visual metaphors in these advertisements.What’s more,the thesis uses the latest software of multimedia data processing and analysis Nvivo11 to annotate and count data following the steps: data input,data editing,encoding and creating nodes.Afterwards,qualitative researches are conducted including visual metaphor construal,search of informative and communicative intentions and discussion of cognitive pragmatic functions.The research findings are presented as follows:(1)According to modes involved,visual metaphors in print beverage alcohol advertising include two categories: image monomodal metaphor(43.3%)and image-text multimodal metaphor(56.7%)that can be further classified into complement(16.7%)and reinforcement(40%).What’s more,in terms of the way the target and source domains physically pictured,visual metaphor can be divided into four sub-types: contextual metaphor(16.7%),hybrid metaphor(23.3%),juxtaposed metaphor(26.7%)and integrated metaphor(33.3%).For visual metaphors in print beverage alcohol advertising,pictorial mode is the major mode in source and target domains,and pictorial and verbal modes are well matched.Through comparison,visual metaphor ALCOHOLIC DRINK IS WOMAN can be found in all three kinds of print beverage alcohol advertisements.Even so,three kinds of beverage alcohol advertisements have their own metaphorical expressions: fresh beer: BEER IS SEA;mellow wine: WINE IS RED SILK;irritative distilled liquor: VODKA IS PEAK.It is worth mentioning that 36.7% of metaphorical mappings in this research involve metonymy that provides the essential basis for metaphor.In other words,metaphor and metonymy interact with each other to construct meanings.(2)Though the number of different types is different,their interpretation is similar,including two processes: ostensive process and inferential process.For the advertisers,visual metaphors show informative intentions and communicative intentions to the audience as ostensive stimuli;for the audience,they will read the context(internal context and external context)carefully to get the informative intentions after receiving the ostensive stimuli,and then find the communicative intentions by interpreting visual metaphors with the help of the optimal relevance principle.Once visual metaphors are understood,communicative intentions can be recognized.Usually,in print beverage alcohol advertising,communicative intention is highlighting the advantages and attraction of alcoholic drinks to persuade consumers to purchase them.Eventually,the audience’s cognitive environment is affected to some extent.Despite that interpreting visual metaphors in print beverage alcohol advertising is seeking the optimal relevance,identifying visual metaphor and searching for the informative intentions and communicative intentions,different types of visual metaphors have different focuses: The construal key of contextual metaphor is understanding the context so as to infer the source domain;For juxtaposed metaphor,the correlation between two domains is the core.The audience should pay more attention to the texts and the encyclopedic knowledge and experience;Hybrid metaphor and integrated metaphor are similar because two domains are presented.The key of construing them is finding out the similarities between two domains.Compared with image-text multimodal metaphor,image monomodal metaphor offers less information relatively,so the advertisers prefer to use simple metaphors whose two domains and feature mappings are easier to identify.(3)Visual metaphors in print beverage alcohol advertising have four main functions: persuasive function,economic function,informative function and aesthetic function.Persuasive function is the most primary function containing cognitive persuasion and emotional persuasion.Cognitive persuasive function is achieved mainly through influencing people’s cognition about the target domain by arousing people’s attention by creating semantic conflicts,highlighting and creating the information in it.Emotional persuasion is realized by transferring emotional preferences through source domain and eliciting positive emotions in cognition;Economic persuasion is reflected in two parts that the matching of images and words improves the transmission efficiency of information and the images show the metaphor vividly;Informative function is also an important function of visual metaphors in the print beverage alcohol advertising,which is achieved through two ways: polite utterances and creating meanings;Ways to realize the aesthetic function of visual metaphors in print beverage alcohol advertisements can be summarized as: creating novel metaphors,using color metaphor and visual metaphors’ special features.The useful functions of visual metaphor make it be used widely in print beverage alcohol advertising.As to the findings,theoretically,the thesis further proves the conceptual metaphor especially multimodal metaphor.Also,it is of great significance in expanding studies of metaphor and multimodal metaphor because a comprehensive research is conducted from both cognitive and pragmatic perspectives.In addition,practically,the thesis gives some hints to the advertisers on print advertising design and help consumers understand advertising in a subjective and accurate way so as to purchase rationally. |
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