A Comparative Study Of Multimodal Metaphors In Chinese And American Bank Print Advertisements Based On The Conceptual Blending Theory

With the development of economy and society,bank advertisements in the financial industry emerge frequently.Simple,efficient and vivid print advertisement can effectively display the image of the bank,promote the bank products,and increase the competitiveness of the bank.Forceville(2009)defined modality as “a system of symbols that can be interpreted using specific perceptual processes”,and then classified modality into linguistic symbols,sounds,images,colors,layout,gestures,flavors,etc.Multimodal metaphors are not limited to the linguistic mode.It can better realize the cognitive construction of metaphorical meaning through the transformation and mapping between different modes,therefore,has been widely used in bank print advertisements.Conceptual blending theory refers to the cross-spatial mapping of the generic space,which is formed by the similar elements or cognitive frameworks in two input spaces,and the blending space to produce cognitive results.Based on the modern linguist,Fauconnier's conceptual blending theory(1997),and guided by Zhao Xiufeng's(2013)conceptual integration model.Firstly,the key information of the text is briefly sorted out in the semiotic base space,according to the linguistic text,color,layout,etc.Secondly,the author put the information in the two input spaces,and the same ingredients of the input space are summarized in the generic space to generate meaning space.Finally,under the restriction of dynamic process,emotion or aesthetic factors,the final cognitive meaning is formed.This paper adopts text analysis research method,takes 46 Chinese and American bank print advertisements as research data,analyses the cognitive construction process of multimodal metaphors,and compares the similarities and differences in the cognitive construction process.The comparative results show that,on the one hand,the multimodal metaphors in Chinese and American bank print advertisements have something in common.First of all,both involve a large number of modes,such as color,picture,layout,language and so on,which make their advertisements more attractive and persuasive respectively.Secondly,different sensory modes,such as visual,auditory,tactile modality,are also used to convey the metaphorical meaning in detail.Thirdly,both the source domain are closely connected to the cultural backgrounds.On the other hand,there are also some cognitive differences between multimodal metaphors in the Chinese and American bank advertisements.The differences lie in the emphasis of the modes,the choice of the source domain and the way to persuade and achieve advertising goals.Through the comparative analysis of multimodal metaphors in Chinese and American bank print advertisements,this paper preliminarily explores the cognitive construction process of multimodal metaphors;compares the similarities and differences in this process;enriches the corpus of multimodal metaphors research,and hopes to provide some inspiration for the designers of bank print advertisements.