Multimodal Metaphors In Chinese Anti-epidemic Cartoons:Classification And Construction Of Ideology

Ideology is the cognition and understanding of things,and it is also the sum of ideas,viewpoints,concepts,thoughts,values and other elements.The construction of ideology is based on the construction of discourse itself,and is constructed and spread through multiple media.However,the construction of ideology from the perspective of linguistics pays less attention to the problem of constructing discourse itself.This study combines multi-modal discourse analysis and systematically researches the socialist ideology based on the anti-epidemic spirit,focusing on how the socialist ideology is constructed and spread through multimodal metaphors.Forceville and Urios-Aparisi’s Multimodal Metaphor has opened up new horizons in the study of metaphor cognition,and has attracted the attention and interest of many cognitive scholars.Through searching and analyzing,it is found that the research on multimodal metaphor is mostly focused on case studies,and there are still few multimodal studies based on quantitative methods.Based on the theory of multimodal metaphors,this thesis takes anti-epidemic cartoons as an example with quantitative,qualitative research methods and taking cartoons as a case analysis to explore its way of ideology construction,combining the current social environment to explain its effect of ideology construction.This research mainly answers two questions:(1)What types of conceptual metaphors are employed in the anti-coronavirus epidemic cartoons?(2)What is the social and cultural ideology reflected and constructed in and behind the anti-coronavirus epidemic cartoons?The cartoons in the thesis collect from the website of China Daily News Cartoon.Pieces of 502 cartoons with typical multimodal metaphor features were selected,and542 multimodal metaphors were identified.The thesis systematically analyzes and summarizes the types of multimodal metaphors in anti-epidemic cartoons and then combines the current social and political environment to reveal the effect of ideology construction in and behind anti-epidemic cartoons.This research’s main findings are as follows: First of all,there are five types of multimodal metaphors in anti-epidemic cartoons.Namely,HUAMAN metaphors,IMPLEMENT metaphors,BODY PART metaphors,EVENT metaphors,and ANIMAL metaphors.Then,in terms of the ideology constructed in anti-epidemic cartoons,putting people’s life first,nationwide solidarity,and the sense of mission for humanity is the ideology constructed in the anti-epidemic comics.Among them,nationwide solidarity occupies the most percentage in fighting against the epidemic,which has fully demonstrated the socialist system’s superiority in fighting against the epidemic and unanimous confidence and determination towards succeeding in fighting against epidemics.In terms of the ways of ideological construction,the anti-epidemic spirits are constructed by highlighting the size and using popular and current entities as the source domains,thus forming popular and innovative characteristics of ideology construction.This kind of ideological propaganda is more popular and close to everyday life,increasing adequate understanding and strucking a chord with people.