A Conceptual Blending Perspective On The Construction Of Multimodal Metaphors

With the development of modern technology,more and more media forms appear in people’s vision.Movie,music,advertisement,live video streaming,small video and so on have all played important roles in information transfer.Multimodal metaphor,as the further development of traditional metaphors,refers to the metaphor whose target and source domains are each represented exclusively or predominantly in different modalities,the dynamism and interactivity of which fully reveal the abstract mental processes of metaphor generation.On the basis of conceptual blending theory proposed by Fauconnier in 1997,this thesis chooses news cartoons about COVID-19 from the official website of China Daily as the research object and explores the construction of multimodal metaphors with both quantitative and qualitative methods,with the aim to answer three questions: 1)What is the process of meaning construction of multimodal metaphor in news cartoons about COVID-19 from China Daily website? 2)How is the meaning of multimodal metaphors constructed in different blending networks? 3)What is the function of each blending network during the process of meaning construction?Major findings of this research are listed below.First,the metaphorical meaning in most cartoons collected is constructed through the single-scope network.Second,different blending networks have their different functions in the process of conceptual integration.The simplex network can help readers better understand certain abstract concepts or structures;the mirror network serves to consolidate and strengthen important structures in news reports or cartoons;the single-scope network may provide a different perspective for news report interpretation;through double-scope network,the connotations of news can be expanded and deepened.At last,interpretation of multimodal metaphors is restricted by some cultural factors.