CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION
1.1 Research Background
Metaphor research has gradually become an independent and mature field as more and more studies has been conducted on it. It has been brought up by cognitive linguists including the famous George Lakoff that metaphor is not limited to its use of rhetorical device. It is a production of human perception and a cognitive tool for human to make use of their experience accumulated from certain area to understand unfamiliar things from another area. In his influential book, Metaphor We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson (1980:3) put forward the idea of conceptual metaphor and point out that metaphor runs through our daily life. Not only does it penetrate in our language, but also reflects on our thoughts and actions. The wide acceptation of the idea has made researches on metaphor break its restriction to the traditional metaphor theories based on literature and rhetoric and enters a brand-new world of cognitive field.
However, with the rapid and continuous development of science and technology, the way people communicate has changed a lot. Verbal language is no longer the only way for people to express themselves. Non-verbal media such as pictures, sounds, colors have all been increasingly important resources for meaning constructions and have played a role of vital significance in exchange of information and daily communication. As a result, most of the previous studies on conceptual metaphor are restricted to the analysis of verbal resources, focusing on illustrating their linguistic features and semantic structures. As there is a lack of thorough explorations in other non-verbal semiotic resources with meaning potential, such studies have fallen short of the development. Given the fact that nowadays the manifestation of metaphors have extended to non-verbal modes including music, pictures, gestures and so on, recently a number of researchers led by Forceville spent tremendous time and efforts on shifting metaphor study from verbal texts to the domain of interdisciplinary multimodality for the purpose of providing a larger space for the development of metaphor researches to match the development of human communications realized in multiple ways.
....................
1.2 Rationale
People nowadays are bombarded with all kinds of advertisements everywhere like TV commercials at home, posters on the public transportations, billboards by the road, and messages from mobile phones. The thesis chooses to analyze advertisements not only because its penetration into all aspects of people‘s life, but also due to the fact that it represents a genre full of metaphors with a multimodal character and clear-cut persuading intentions. The
