A Study Of The Multimodal Metaphoric Construction Of Ideology

Ideology is an abstract and systematic collection of ideas,viewpoints and concepts related to society,politics and economy.As a component of superstructure,ideology is presented,spread and practiced by discourse.As to the inalienability between ideology and discourse,the ideology studies from the perspective of discourse caught attentions from disciplines.Previous discourse studies on ideology from the perspectives of politics and communication,mostly paid attention to the speech right,rested on the general theoretical exploration and broad practical suggestion,and lacked systematical investigation and analysis based on a number of authentic research data.The ideology studies from the perspective of linguistics focused much on revealing the ideology behind the discourse,and paid less attention to the discourse construction of ideology.This study conducts systematic investigation to the discourse of mainstream ideology represented by the core socialist values with discourse analysis.It mainly explores how the multimodal metaphor constructs and promotes the abstract discourse of ideology.This thesis investigates the multimodal metaphoric construction of ideology based on the theories of multimodal metaphor and multimodal discourse analysis with quantitative and qualitative research methods by taking the posters of the core socialist values as cases.It aims to explore the representative patterns of multimodal metaphors and the construction of ideology so as to explain the effect of ideology construction in combination of context of social culture.The research data are downloaded from the China Civilization Website,and 296 multimodal metaphors are identified out of the 220 posters of the core socialist values that have the typical characteristics of multimodal metaphor.In terms of the research procedures,first,types of multimodal metaphors in the posters of the core socialist values are summarized with systematic analysis.Second,the representative patterns are generalized.Finally,the effect of multimodal metaphorical construction of ideology is explained,and the ideologies underlied in the posters of the core social values are revealed on the basis of the social culture and political context.Findings of this study are as below.Firstly,there are six multimodal metaphors in the posters of the core socialist values,including metaphors of ANIMAL,PLANT,HUAMN,EVENT,NATURE and JOURNEY.Secondly,there are three main representative patterns of multimodal metaphors in the posters,be they representative patterns of A1B1,A1B2 and A1B1B2.Specifically,the representative pattern of A1B1 refers to the mono-modal mapping between the verbal texts in the source domain and the target domain with the complement of image.The representative pattern of A1B2 refers to that cross-modal mapping from the image in the source domain to the verbal text in the target domain.The representative pattern of A1B1B2 refers to the multimodal mapping from the verbal text and image in the source domain to the verbal text in the target domain.Particularly,the pattern of A1B1B2 is the most frequently used representative pattern in the posters.Thirdly,in terms of the ideologies represented in the posters,prosperity and harmony,freedom,and dedication are the highly represented ideologies at national,social and individual levels respectively,which indicates that the prosperity and harmony,freedom,and dedication remain the top priorities in the construction of ideology.It shows China's ambition to construct a modernized socialist power,build a harmonious socialist society and make people happier in life.In terms of the ideologies underlied in the posters,they are mainly embodied in the innovation,narrativity and popularization of the multimodal metaphorical construction of ideology.The heterogeneous isomorphism of the ideologies represented and the ideologies underlied reflects the consistence between the ways of publicity and themes of the posters of the core socialist values,which verifies the changes of the political promotion in present China.The publicity of mainstream ideology is close to people's life and is accepted more easily by people.