An Analysis Of Multimodal Metaphor And Metonymy On The Front Covers Of The Economist

The booming modern computer science as well as multimedia technology have brought about great changes in the way of human communication.The carriers of information dissemination from the original voice,to the text,to the image,and then to the video,become richer and more colorful.The way people communicate has changed from a single mode to a multi-mode.At the same time,metaphor,which is widely used in our daily life,has also developed from the conceptual metaphor,pictorial metaphor and to modern multimodal metaphor.As one of the mainstream media magazines in the West,the front covers of The Economist with the combination of words and pictures convey information to readers and express their views.Owing to the economic prosperity and active involvement in world affairs,The Economist has opened a new column especially for China to provide more pages covering Chinese issues.The number of covers on Chinese themes has also increased.For the convenience of the research,this paper selected six front covers in The Economist from 2012 to 2015,which were more representative for the identification of multimodal metaphor and better in line with the theme of China.Based on conventional conceptual metaphor and multimodal metaphor,this thesis adopted mainly the qualitative research method and conducted a systematic analysis by the four steps,including description,identification,interpretation and discussion.By adopting multimodal metaphoric and metonymic relation mode,the source domain and target domain could be identified.The thesis tried to answer the questions listed below.First,what are the two domains of multimodal metaphor in the front covers and which types of metaphor do they belong?Secondly,what are the working mechanisms of multimodal metaphor based on the model of Panther?The third question is what are the multimodal metonymies in the front covers?The conclusions of this research were that the covers of The Economist were composed of multimodal metaphors,including structural metaphor,orientational metaphor as well as ontological metaphor by way of the interaction of text and picture.Multimodal metaphor mechanism can be presented by the identification of the source domain and target domain.Multimodal metonymies are the PART FOR WHOLE type.Metaphor and metonymy interact with each other to convey communication intentions.In addition,The Economist is a journal of finance and politics,covering current issues about the economy and politics worldwide.As a result,the thorough background knowledge and current affairs were the basic requirements for readers to understand its metaphor.The familiarity of Chinese culture was required as well for the interpretation of metaphors concerning with Chinese themes.This paper could add studies on multimodal metaphor analysis of the magazine front covers by the practical case studies based on conceptual metaphor and multimodal metaphor.On the one hand,this thesis could enrich the research subjects of multimodal metaphor and further verify that human’s thought and action are fundamentally metaphorical in nature,no matter verbally or nonverbally.On the other hand,it might also provide a new angle for Chinese magazine cover designers by taking advantage of the multimodal metaphors and the interaction between the picture and title when they dealt with cover designs.