A Comparative Study Of Multimodal Metaphors In Chinese And American Automobile Print Advertisements

With the rapid development of economy and the gradual improvement of cultural soft power,advertisements’ influence is immeasurable,so does the influence of Chinese and American advertisements,especially of commercial advertisements.Automobiles are the most common commercial products,whose print advertisements contain highly condensed factual and evaluative information,thus this thesis attempts to choose this type of advertisements in China and America as the target of this study,and comparisons between Chinese and American APAs provide more enlightenment for Chinese designers.As we know,automobile print advertisements are important not only for commercial activities and cultural communication,but also for linguistic research.Given that,this thesis makes a comparative analysis of multimodal metaphors in 100 Chinese and American automobile print advertisements(APAs)based on visual grammar,consisting of three research questions:(1)How might Chinese and American APAs realize the construction of multimodal metaphors by taking advantage of visual grammar,that is,representational meaning,interactive meaning,and compositional meaning?(2)What are the similarities and differences of multimodal metaphors between Chinese and American APAs?(3)What are the similarities and differences between Chinese and American automobile culture reflected through the similarities and differences of multimodal metaphors between Chinese and American APAs?The conclusions in this thesis are drawn as follows:(1)In the representational meaning,Chinese and American APAs respectively construct explicit and implicit defamiliarization metaphors and domestication metaphors in the action process,classificational process,analytical process,and symbolic process;in the interactive meaning,Chinese and American APAs respectively construct the conventional multimodal metaphors in terms of social distance,attitude and modality;in the compositional meaning,Chinese and American APAs realize the conventional multimodal metaphors in terms of information value,salience and framing.(2)The similarities are mainly as follows: Chinese and American APAs construct comparatively low frequencies of multimodal metaphors in the action process,while Chinese and American APAs construct comparatively high frequencies of multimodal metaphors under the long shot,oblique angle,high modality,and center-edge structure and salience.However,the differences are mainly as follows: firstly,the frequencies of multimodal metaphors constructed under the symbolic process,the low angle,left-right structure and up-down structure,and framing are relatively high in Chinese APAs,while the frequencies of multimodal metaphors constructed in the analytical process,under the eye-to-eye angle are relatively high in American APAs;secondly,Chinese APAs realize the implicit defamiliarization metaphors and domestication metaphors with high frequency,while American APAs realize explicit defamiliarization metaphors with high frequency.(3)The similarities of multimodal metaphors constructed embody the simplification in the design,the objectivity,authenticity and so on in the content of Chinese and American APAs;the differences of multimodal metaphors constructed reflect Chinese APAs attach importance to symbolic meaning,prefer implicit expressions,go after social status,and depend more on rules,while reflect American APAs emphasize the logical reasoning,prefer direct expressions,go after equality,and advocate innovation and freedom.