A Study Of Multimodal Metaphors In The Documentary It’s About In Winter From The Perspective Of Cognitive Linguistics

Conceptual Metaphor Theory(CMT)has been trying to prove that metaphor is the way that people think and act.Metaphors can be expressed not only through text language but also through other modes,such as pictures,sounds,and music.As the way of transforming information has gradually diverged from verbal language to multiple modes,the study of multimodal metaphors is an inevitable trend.However,the metaphor studies of pure verbal language outnumber the studies of multimodal metaphors.Moreover,from the perspective of cognitive linguistics,the studies of multimodal metaphors mainly focus on advertising,comics and movies.It seldom involves the dynamic meaning construction in documentaries.Therefore,from the perspective of cognitive linguistics,based on work mechanism of multimodal metaphors and Conceptual Blending Theory(CBT),this thesis will study the representation of multimodal metaphors and dynamic meaning construction of multimodal metaphors in the documentary It’s about in Winter.The research questions are as follows:(1)What are the types of multimodal metaphor in the documentary It’s about in Winter?(2)How do the multimodal metaphors in the documentary construct their meanings?(3)Why are multimodal metaphors applied in the documentary?In this thesis,the documentary It’s about in Winter is taken as the research data,which is broadcast by China Media Group on January 29,2022 for recording stories behind Beijing Winter Olympic Games.With the help of Elan 6.4,the classification and numbers of multimodal metaphors are analyzed and calculated.The quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted to describe and analyze the above research questions.Firstly,the thesis finds that the documentary presents six modes: verbal mode,pictorial mode,written mode,music,gesture and sound.There are totally 137 multimodal metaphors.Based on the numbers of mode permutation shown in the cross-domain mappings,multimodal metaphors in this documentary can be divided into three categories: dual-modal metaphor(37.4%),tri-modal metaphor(53.2%)and quadra-modal metaphor(9.4%).Dual-modal metaphors can be further sub-divided into 14 types according to different mode permutations,tri-modal metaphors can be sub-divided as 16 types and quadra-modal metaphors can be sub-divided as 6 types.Secondly,multimodal metaphors in the documentary are constructed through four basic blending networks: simplex network,mirror network,single-scope network and double-scope network.Thirdly,the motivations of applying multimodal metaphors include the ideological motivations and the cognitive motivations.The ideological motivations are embodied through patriotism and superiority of socialism.Cognitive motivations are mainly embodied through the features of multimodal metaphors: dynamic nature,vividness and universality.