| Children's emotional education in the early stage plays a vital role in their later cognitive development and thus it is of great significance to the individual growth of children as well as the popularization of family values and family education in a specific culture.As one of the main ways of emotional education for preschool children,children's kinship-theme picture books are gradually recognized and adopted at home and abroad.In order to enhance children readers' comprehension of the abstract emotional concepts in picture books,metaphors are often employed.With the development of multimodal cognitive poetics and multimodal metaphor researches,scholars at home and abroad started to pay more attention to multimodal metaphors used in children's picture books in recent years,mainly focusing on the correct interpretation of metaphorical representations based on the combination of pictorial and verbal modes in children's picture books.From the perspective of multimodal cognitive metaphors,this thesis focuses on exploring and comparing the meaning construction of metaphorical representations in Chinese and English children's kinship-theme picture books.The following questions will be specifically answered:(1)What are the types and ratios of metaphors in the selected kinship-theme picture books in Chinese and English respectively? What are the similarities and differences?(2)How do different types of metaphors construct meaning in the selected kinship-theme picture books in Chinese and English respectively? What are the similarities and differences?In order to explore the above issues,14 classic preschool(3-5 years old)children's kinship-theme picture books are selected.To reduce the subjectivity of the study,the author follows the principle of Investigator Triangulation,inviting another two researchers to identify and classify the multimodal metaphors and their meaning construction patterns in the selected data together.Firstly,with the help of MetaphorIdentification Procedure(MIP)proposed by Pragglejaz Group(2007),235 multimodal metaphors(114 in Chinese and 121 in English)are identified;then,based on conceptual metaphor theory and multimodal metaphor theories,four types of multimodal metaphors are identified and four meaning construction patterns of multimodal metaphors are proposed in children's picture books,and finally the ratio of each metaphor type and their meaning construction patterns are compared in a detailed way between Chinese and English source data;in order to ensure the credibility and validity of the study,the quantitative analysis software SPSS(version19)is employed and Chi-square test(2 × C)or Fisher's Exact Test is performed on the two sets of Chinese and English data to investigate whether there are statistically significant differences between the two groups.It is worth mentioning that,combining the genre features and cultural differences,the author provides a cognitive interpretation of the above similarities and differences in the discussion parts.Major findings are as follows:(1)The general distribution patterns of the four multimodal metaphors in Chinese and English children's kinship-theme picture books are similar.Namely,domestication metaphors are the most widely used(Chinese: 43%;English: 67.8%),followed by cross-experience metaphors(Chinese: 29.8%);English: 19%)and personification metaphors(Chinese: 21.1%;English: 9.9%),and monsterization metaphors are the least used(Chinese: 6.1%;English: 3.3%);but the results of Chi-square test(2 × C)showed that there were statistically significant differences between the two sets of data in English and Chinese,mainly reflected in the distribution of domestication metaphors and cross-experience metaphors;(2)The general distribution patterns of meaning construction patterns of multimodal metaphors in Chinese and English children's kinship-theme picture books are similar.Namely,most metaphors are based on metonymy and the interaction between multiple modes(Chinese: 64%;English: 67%),while the proportion of metaphoric meaning based on monomodal and non-metonymic pattern is the smallest(Chinese: 5.3%;English: 0.8%).In addition,personification metaphors in Chineseand English picture books are all constructed by metonymy,but it is worth mentioning that nearly half of cross-experience metaphors in Chinese picture books are based on non-metonymic methods(referred to as social connotation in this study),while in English picture books they are only based on metonymy;Fisher's Exact Test results further showed that there was no significant difference in the two groups as a whole,but there were significant differences in the distribution of the four meaning construction patterns in domestication and cross-experience metaphors;As a new attempt in the research field of multimodal metaphor and picture books,this study has profound significance.In theory,focusing on children's picture books,this study broadens the research scope of multimodal cognitive poetics and enriches the understanding of the utilization and distribution of multimodal metaphors in Chinese and English children's kinship-theme picture books.In practice,this study provides a reference for future design of domestic children's picture book by comparing the different choices and operation of multimodal metaphors between Chinese and English children's picture books.At the same time,by comparing the cognitive mechanism of metaphors in children's picture books with the same theme between different cultures,this thesis reveals the similarities and differences between Chinese and English cognition of family relationships and emotionally educational patterns,which will also provide reference for the development of parent-child education model in China. |
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