A Multimodal Study Of The Oscar Best Pictures’ English Posters(2012-2021) From The Perspective Of Embodied-cognitive Linguistics

The film poster is a typical multimodal discourse,combining text,image and color as a symbolic system.It is a carrier for the audience to understand and obtain the film information comprehensively,playing a role in promoting the film,attracting the audience and conveying values.The study of multimodality in film posters has been attracting the attention of scholars at home and abroad.Based on functional linguistics,the former scholars have mainly analyzed the representational,interactive and compositional meanings in posters,explored the ideational,interpersonal and textual meanings in posters,and carried out research from the perspectives of multimodal discourse analysis,contextual interpretation and visual interpretation.Based on cognitive linguistics,previous studies have analyzed the relationship between the cognitive paths,ways of representation and relations between metaphors and metonymy from the perspectives of multimodal metaphor and multimodal metonymy.Although the previous studies have left a lot of valuable results,they not only lack a unified explanation of the meaning generation mechanism of multimodal symbols in posters,but lack multimodal studies of film posters from the perspective of EmbodiedCognitive Linguistics.In view of this,based on Embodied-Cognitive Linguistics,this paper applies construal,multimodal metaphor and multimodal metonymy to the 10 English posters of Oscar Best Pictures from 2012 to 2021,in an attempt to analyze the interaction between multiple modes in the posters,and to explore the cognitive mechanism of the film posters and the cognitive motivation of the poster designers,in order to reveal the connotations and values of the film posters.The findings of this paper are as follows:(1)Five modes are used most frequently in the ten posters,namely pictorial,written,color,pictorial combined with color and pictorial,written combined with color mode,which reflects that poster designers prefer to use three modes of pictorial,written and color singularly or interactively to express the same concept in the process of making the posters corporately.(2)From the four dimensions of construal,it can be seen that the two principles of prominence and specificity are most commonly used in film posters,proving that from the Embodied-Cognitive Linguistic perspective,specificity(79.3%)and prominence(74.1%)are the most important ways of construal.The distribution of the three principles of focusing,perspective and specificity shows that poster designers give priority to figure and ground,spatial perspective and rough description in the production of their posters.This validates the feasibility of construal theory from the Embodied-Cognitive Linguistic perspective,which can provide a unified interpretation of the poster.(3)The multimodal metaphors in the ten posters can be divided into five mapping relationships: source domain(color)? target domain(text),source domain(image)? target domain(image),source domain(image)? target domain(text),source domain(image combined with color)? target domain(image)and source domain(text)? target domain(image).(4)The number of multimodal metaphors(25)and multimodal metonymy(27)used by poster designers is generally consistent among the ten posters,reflecting the consistency in the role of these two cognitive mechanisms in the embodied cognitive process of poster creation.And the pictorial mode(59.2%)is mostly used as a multimodal metonymy and the color mode(64%)is mostly used as a multimodal metaphor.This shows that multimodal metonymy is more direct in the pictorial mode and multimodal metaphor is more intuitive and economical in the color mode.The significances of this study are the followings.Firstly,this paper applies the Embodied-Cognitive Linguistics to the interpretation of the modal interactions and cognitive mechanisms of film posters,which not only provides some new ideas for multimodal cognitive study of posters,but also broadens the research scope of Embodied-Cognitive Linguistics.Secondly,multimodal analysis of film posters can provide more diverse perspectives to present the cultural,value and other connotative meanings and aesthetic needs of films.It also provides some new research paths for journalism and media,and clear guidance for more effective design of films and advertisements.This study provides some references for domestic poster production from a linguistic perspective.