A Study On Medical Workers’ Images In Anti-epidemic Cartoons From The Perspective Of Multimodal Metaphors

In early 2020,Corona Virus Disease 2019(COVID-19)raged all over the world.Faced with the public health of international concern(PHEIC),medical workers as the main force on the epidemic’s front line received special concerns from society.News media,as the important means to transmit messages about Covid-19 and guide public opinion,have given wide coverage to medical workers in the form of news cartoons to demonstrate the role of medical workers during the epidemic.News cartoons usually form a multimodal discourse by combining written symbols and images resources with rich metaphorical meanings and become a significant genre for multimodal metaphors.They can effectively construct medical workers’ images through the interaction of multimodal symbolic resources.Therefore,this thesis selects news cartoons to explore the images of medical workers.Based on Lakoff and Johnson’s(1980)conceptual metaphor theory and Fauconnier and Turner’s(2002)conceptual blending theory,this thesis takes 243 news cartoons about medical workers from China News Cartoon Network during the epidemic as the corpus to explore types of multimodal metaphors and the meaning construction between image and text elements.Then the thesis reveals the image of Chinese medical workers that it has created and spread.The research tentatively drew conclusions as below: Firstly,ontological metaphors,structural metaphors,and orientational metaphors are all distributed in news cartoons.Structural metaphors account for the largest,followed by ontological metaphors,and orientational metaphors with the smallest share.They are expressed in thirteen forms.Game metaphors,journey metaphors,war metaphors,character metaphors,myth metaphors,and study metaphors belong to structural metaphors.Ontological metaphors contain entity and substance metaphors,container metaphors,plant metaphors,and human body metaphors.Orientational metaphors have three forms which are up metaphors,down metaphors and front-back metaphors.Secondly,in the process of meaning constructions of multimodal metaphors,single-scope networks account for the largest,followed by mirror networks and simplex networks.Double-scope networks account for the smallest.Each space interacts to form the dynamic construction of multimodal metaphorical meaning.Finally,we conclude the images of medical workers in the following seven aspects.In the fight against the epidemic,they establish an image of brave contrarians fearless of death.From the perspective of their routine work,the news cartoons show that they heal the wounded and rescue the dying and work hard.Concerning the doctor-patient relationship,they show an image of caring the patience.In exemplary deeds,they exhibit the image of benevolence,responsibility,and devotion.In the family role,their images are sentimental,flesh-and-blood,and dedicated.In professional knowledge,the images of medical workers are authoritative,calm,and rigorous.In terms of the economy,the image of medical workers is the promoter of work resuming.This thesis analyzes the construction of the images of medical workers in news cartoons from the perspective of multimodal metaphors and demonstrates again the applicability of this theory in analyzing news cartoons.By discussing the image of Chinese medical workers created during the anti-epidemic period in all aspects and multi-dimensions,it is conducive to spreading positive social energy.