A Study Of Death Discourse In The Animated Film Coco From The Perspective Of Multimodal Metaphor

The metaphoric study in cognitive linguistics has been developing and improving all the time.Its first improvement is the transformation from traditional metaphor to contemporary metaphor.The second improvement is the transformation from conceptual metaphor to multimodal metaphor,leading a new direction of current metaphor research.The research background of this thesis is that there are several multimodal metaphors about death discourse in the animated film Coco,which provides the possibility for the research.The analysis of the existing literature on Coco is mostly from the perspective of film theme;while the researches on the death discourse from the perspective of multimodal metaphor is few.Thus it makes this research meaningful.This research adopts the methods of quantitative and qualitative analysis.It is mainly from the perspective of multimodal metaphor,and takes multimodal metaphor theory and conceptual metaphor theory as the theoretical framework.Besides,40 images,actors’ lines and music about death discourse are used as the corpus to analyze the constructed meaning of the death discourse in the film.This study answers the following three research problems: what types of multimodal metaphors about death discourse are used in the animated film Coco,what characteristics of multimodal metaphors about death discourse in the animated film Coco are presented and how the meaning of death discourse in Coco is constructed through multimodal metaphors.The results show that:Firstly,based on the analysis of death discourse about multimodal metaphors in the film Coco,visual metaphors(character modeling,props and colors)and aural metaphors(music and dubbing)are found in Coco.Secondly,the multimodal metaphors in the animated film Coco are mainly presented by means of colors,dubbing,characters,props and music.Pictorial-linguistic metaphors are the main multimodal metaphors in Coco.In the multimodal environment,the metaphorical meaning of death discourse is more abundant.Finally,the meaning of multimodal metaphors about death discourse in Coco is constructed though the mappings between different modes.The multimodal metaphors in Coco can make the theme and death culture of the film more vivid.Readers and audiences can therefore understand the theme and death culture of the film better.