A Cognitive Study Of Emotion Metaphors And Metonymies In The Animation Film Inside Out

The central idea of conceptual metaphor theory is that metaphor is a matter of thought rather than a figure of speech,which makes it reasonable and necessary to investigate the multimodal manifestation of metaphor.Likewise,metonymy has yielded similar analyses as another pervasive conceptual device;however,the implication of this conceptual mechanism for multimodal discourse have only begun to be examined,which also leaves great research potential for examining the function of metonymy in the construction of metaphor in multimodal discourse.Animation films,with their artificial and comprehensive nature,can exploit dimensions of metaphor and metonymy to convey perceptive,cognitive and affective meanings.Therefore,they are particular useful for researchers to investigate the working mechanism,mapping processes and meaning construction of metaphors and metonymies,especially emotion metaphors and metonymies,in multimodal media.Based on conceptual metaphor theory and conceptual metonymy theory,and drawing on the typologies of metaphtonymy,this thesis carries out an elaborate analysis of the emotion metonymies,metaphors and metaphtonymies in the animation film Inside Out,in which emotions literally become main characters.After identifying and analyzing the types,mapping processes and functions of different emotion metonymies and metaphors,the major findings are as follows:(1)Emotion metonymies in Inside Out mainly serve as deictically created emotion cues to convey to viewers specific emotional state of characters in a focused and multimodal way,which involves domain expansion in the target domain of emotion metaphors.All emotion metonymies are cases of EFFECT OF EMOTION FOR THE EMOTION and source-in-target metonymy,which has two subcategories:physiological responses for the emotion and expressive responses for the emotion including facial expressions and behavioral reactions.(2)Manifested in vision and sound,emotion metaphors in Inside Out provide viewers with sensorially concrete,cross-modal gestalt of metaphoric mappings in vision,sound and movement,so as to evoke basic emotion scripts and intensify empathic feelings of viewers towards characters.Three types of emotion metaphors have been generalized:emotion metaphors expressing synesthetic qualities,emotion metaphors as EVENT STRUCTURE metaphors,and novel emotion metaphors,among which EMOTIONS ARE FORCES is the master metaphor that contains evaluative meaning.(3)Four types of emotion metaphtonymies in Inside Out are found:metonymic expansion of metaphoric target;parallel metonymic expansion in both metaphoric domains;metonymic expansion of metaphoric target with metonymic reduction of metaphoric source;metonymic reduction of metaphoric target with metonymic expansion of metaphoric source.It is the process of interaction with metonymies that adequately constructs the meaning of emotion metaphors and displays vividly specific features of emotions.(4)By integrating important emotion metaphors and metonymies in the film on the global scale,the theme of film addressed in the narrative can be saliently revealed.In Inside Out,it is the valence transformation of emotion forces from antagonistic to supportive or from supportive to antagonistic that reflects and conveys the meaning of balance and growth.All in all,the emotion metonymies and metaphors used in Inside Out contribute to communicating to the viewers vividly and effectively the inner emotional states of characters and significant meanings by motivating viewer’s immediate and reflexive perception and understanding multimodally,with emotion metonymies economically foregrounding the specific emotion that turns into the target of emotion metaphors whose target or source domains may also have other conventionalized metonymic bases worth considering so as to elucidate the mapping processes and construction of these emotion metaphors.