美国与中国视频广告中多模态隐喻的认知语言学研究——以啤酒广告为例

硕士学位论文
论 文 题 目 美国与中国视频广告中多模态隐喻的
认知语言学研究—以啤酒广告为例 研究生姓名 陈彬彬
指导教师姓名 苏晓军
专业名称 外国语言学及应用语言学
研究方向 认知语言学
论文提交日期 2015年5月
A Cognitive Linguistic Study of Multimodal Metaphors in American
and Chinese Advertising: Based on Beer Video Advertising
by
Chen Binbin
Under the Supervision of
Professor Su Xiaojun
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
For the Degree of Master of Arts
School of Foreign Languages
Soochow University
May 2015
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to extend my wholehearted gratitude to all those who have helped me with my postgraduate studies.
First of all, my sincere thanks go to my supervisor, Prof. Su Xiaojun, who has granted me great help by carefully scrutinizing every word and every figure of my thesis and offering me invaluable suggestions in conducting my research. Without his insightful comments and knowledgeable instructions I could not have completed the thesis in a satisfactory way. His commitment to academic research and rigorous attitude towards life have exerted great influence on me in terms of both study and life.
I also feel deeply grateful to Prof. Zhu Xinfu, who supervised my undergraduate thesis and has long been concerned with my performance. Without his recommendation I could not have been so fortunate as to be guided by Prof. Su Xiaojun. It is his encouragement and inspiration that have driven me to seek for a higher level.
My indebtedness goes to Prof. Wang Jun, Prof. Fang Hongmei, Prof. Wang Labao, Prof. Jiang Jin, Prof. Gao Yongchen and all the teaching staff in the School of Foreign Languages, Soochow University. Owing to their enlightening lectures and innovative ideas I have developed great interest in language.
In addition, I want to express my heartfelt gratefulness to all the relatives, friends and classmates who have been supporting me not only in thesis writing but also in daily life. Without their solid backup the completion of my thesis would not have been possible.
ABSTRACT
Thanks to globalization, different cultures have been on the way to integration, and the same is true for their advertising. However, the public often feel confused when distinguishing one piece of advertising from another. In response to this call for systemic studies on them scholars from many academies exert their efforts on analyzing metaphors in commercials, in terms of pictures and spoken languages. However, these attempts prove to be one tip of the iceberg as there are too many elements worth noticing in video advertising. It was until recently that public attention has been paid to the multimodal metaphors in commercials, but these scanty researches disperse in their subjects and have not included all the modalities, not to mention that a commercial is rich in carriers of conveying messages.
This thesis attempts to make a comparative analysis of American and Chinese beer video advertising from the perspective of multimodal conceptual metaphor with the help of Multimodal Metaphor theory and some concepts borrowed from Conceptual Metaphor Theory. A corpus of 50 video advertising pieces of 10 beer brands, 5 from China and 5 from U.S.A. respectively, is established. By exploring into the mappings and entailments of these metaphors this thesis intends to find out the similarities and differences in using multimodalities, and then the universality and cross-cultural variations between these two countries, which might shed light on the understanding of beer advertising from America and China for potential consumers who want to spot the deep-rooted implications in advertising and for the businessmen who plan to pioneer in another market.
Through thorough analyses this thesis concludes that similar conceptual metaphors, i.e. HAPPINESS IS DRINKING BEER and BEER IS A LIVING ORGANISM, exist in advertising from both countries which is rendered a result caused by universal embodiment and cultural congruence. Besides, visual modality remains to be the primary one in elaborating beer qualities. Nonetheless, their
preference for modalities and the mappings and entailments underlying the conceptual metaphors differ between these two countries, which is under the impact of different ideological assumptions and cultural traits.
Key Words: beer video advertising, conceptual metaphor, multimodal, universality, cross-cultural variation
摘 要
伴随着全球化的进程，不同文化之间相互借鉴和学习，其中之一就是广告的发展。

面对错综复杂的视频广告，消费者往往不明所以，甚至做出错误的购买决定。

源于此现状，不同领域的学者尝试通过结合图像和文本的分析来建立一套系统的鉴别广告的理论。

然而，遗憾的是，鉴于广告讯息所采用的载体和媒介复杂多样，这些研究仍然只是触碰了广告的冰山一角。

近年来，一些学者试图囊括多种模态来分析广告中所蕴含的信息，却止步于其中的两种或几种模态，更忽视了视频广告中丰富的信息传播方式。

借助多模态隐喻理论和概念隐喻理论中的一些概念，本文试图对美中啤酒视频广告中的多模态概念隐喻进行对比分析，找出两国在传达产品讯息时对于隐喻及其映射和蕴含的选择上的异同，对于模态倾向的异同，从而挖掘出该现象背后所深藏的普遍性和差异性。

对于想要理解不同文化中同一产品的广告含义的普通消费者抑或准备在另一国度开辟新市场的啤酒商来说，本文无疑值得借鉴。

通过对两国啤酒广告对比分析后，本文发现两国广告中都出现的概念隐喻，即“快乐是喝啤酒”和“啤酒是生物”，并且都主要采用了视觉模态来描绘产品的特性，但是，两国的概念隐喻下的映射和蕴含有所不同，且对于模态的偏好也存在差异。

本文认为，两国文化上的某些一致性以及人类所共有的体验基础造就了相同之处；而不同之处则来源于相异的文化特点和意识概念。

关键词：啤酒视频广告、概念隐喻、多模态隐喻、普遍性、跨文化差异性
Table of Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (i)
ABSTRACT (ii)
摘要 (iv)
Chapter One INTRODUCTION (1)
1.1 Background for the Research (1)
1.2 Significance of the Research (2)
1.3 Structure of the Thesis (4)
Chapter Two LITERATURE REVIEW AND THEORETICAL FRAMWORK..6
2.1 Specific Notions (6)
2.1.1 Beer advertising (6)
2.1.2 Metaphor (8)
2.2 Theoretical Framework (9)
2.2.1 Conceptual metaphor theory (10)
2.2.1.1 Components of conceptual metaphor (10)
2.2.1.2 Research on conceptual metaphor abroad (11)
2.2.1.3 Research on conceptual metaphor at home (12)
2.2.2 Multimodal metaphor (12)
2.2.2.1 Modalities of multimodal metaphor (12)
2.2.2.2 Research on multimodal metaphors abroad (13)
2.2.2.3 Research on multimodal metaphors at home (15)
2.3 Methodology (16)
Chapter Three MULTIMODAL CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS IN AMERICAN AND CHINESE BEER ADVERTISING (18)
3.1 Multimodal Conceptual Metaphors in American Beer Advertising (18)
3.1.1 Source and target domains (18)
3.1.2 Mappings and entailments (21)
3.1.3 Preferred modalities (24)
3.2 Multimodal Conceptual Metaphors in Chinese Beer Advertising (25)
3.2.1 Source and target domains in multi-modalities (25)
3.2.2 Mappings and entailments (27)
3.2.3 Preferred modalities (30)
Chapter Four UNIVERSALITY AND CROSS-CULTURAL V ARIATION OF MULTIMODAL CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS (31)
4.1 Universality (31)
4.1.1 Universal embodiment (32)
4.1.2 Cultural congruence (33)
4.2 Cross-cultural Variation (34)
4.2.1 Ideological assumptions (34)
4.2.2 Cultural traits (36)
Chapter Five CONCLUSION (40)
5.1 Major Findings (40)
5.2 Limitations of the Research (41)
5.3 Suggestions for Future Research (42)
REFERENCES (43)
APPENDICES (49)
Chapter One
INTRODUCTION
Metaphor, a basic and common phenomenon in today’s world, has been constantly referred to as a figure of thought other than a speech art. For a long time scholars dedicated their energy to merely written words and their focus has not shifted from monomodality to multimodalities until recently. This thesis attempts to make a comparative analysis of American and Chinese beer advertising from the perspective of multimodal metaphor. It has to be pointed out that in nowadays’ globe “the increased ubiquity of sound, image, film, through TV, the computer and the internet is undoubtedly behind this new emphasis on and interest in the multi-semiotic complexity of the representations we produce and see around us” (Iedema, 2003, p. 33).
1.1 Background for the Research
In the past decades human life has been flooded with advertising regarding almost everything that lures the audience into purchase. It is regrettable but people often undermine the ability to make meaning from the myriad of popular culture texts to which they are exposed, especially video advertising. They take it for granted that these texts just add to entertain the audience by peddling. Fortunately, linguists have been trying to find the cognitive mechanism underlying those flashing words, because video advertising not only influences our society but also reflects certain aspects of that society’s values and that society’s structure. In effect, commercializing is the art of conveying persuasive messages, which has both economic and cultural functions. When Metaphors We Live By was born Conceptual Metaphor came into scholars’ sight with Lakoff and Johnson’s explanation that metaphors were related to human’s thought. Studies on metaphors in advertising have thus been pervasive in linguistic circles.
In most occasions the selling power of a video advertising partly depends upon how well-chosen the conceptual metaphor that words used tend to evoke in consumers
is. However, much attention has been paid to purely verbal messages and texts which in nowadays’ mass communication are often “complemented, or even superseded, by information in other signifying systems” (Forceville & Urios-Aparisi, 2009, p. 3) like images, linguistic sounds of human and music, etc. In fact, today’s readers are often more attracted by the effect arising from the combination of various elements incorporated in advertising. It was not until 2009 when Multimodal Metaphor was published that the public were reminded of the necessity of studying advertising from multimodal perspective. The study on advertising is a fascinating area but important questions are yet to be answered. For example, what are the most common source and target domains used in video advertising from a given field in a given culture.
1.2 Significance of the Research
As Kress (2010, pp. 10-11) put, advertising was a clear instantiation of multimodal communication in which meaning was created by “culturally available resources”, i.e. image, speech, writing, facial expressions, gestures, colors, etc. However, the study of multimodal metaphors in advertising is a recent endeavor. Forceville (2007; 2008) considered that creative metaphors in video advertising often resulted from the combination of many modalities. Urios-Aparisi (2009) suggested that because video advertising consists of dynamic texts, all modalities could contribute to the establishment of multimodal metaphors. Caballero (2009) analyzed the tasting notes in English, Spanish and French wine commercials. Tzanne (2013) examined the multimodal metaphors in Greek TV commercials. Since then on, linguists have paid much attention to multimodal metaphors in video advertising for the purpose of putting this theory into practice and the theorization of multimodality, at large. While studying advertising linguists should bear in mind that information content, creative strategy, format and content style differ with each product category (Zandpour, 1992; Katz & Lee, 1992). Drinking, second to breathing, is most essential of human activities. And as one kind of daily beverages, beer has gained increasing popularity around the world. For years it has been usually accepted that it was the introduction of cereal agriculture
that made it possible for beer invention, but an intriguing counter-argument was put forward that agriculture was possible due to the need for beer (Morris, 1998). In most occasions, the video advertising of beer has a very straightforward purpose directing the audience’s attention persuasively to certain aspects of experience and hiding others, or put in Barthes’ words (1986) that in advertising only those attributes meant to be conveyed got the full concern, which resulted from the key ingredient, intentionality. On the contrary, researches on beer advertising are rare and some studies just take several commercials as examples without cautious selection. Lantolf and Bobrova (2012) made a cross-cultural analysis of multimodal metaphors in American and Ukarian beer commercials and highlighted that the study of other modalities could reveal aspects of metaphorical thinking that were not so available in the verbal modality alone. It is a pity that most of the western researchers have only focused on western developed countries and only a little research has paid attention to eastern countries. Domestic researches on beer advertising are even fewer. Zu (2010) compared the beer commercials in America with those in China in terms of culture and values. Considering the inescapable trend of globalization and China’s national strategy of “bring in and go out” it is beneficial for both the consumers and entrepreneur to dig deeper in video advertising. In broader sense, the cross-cultural analysis of video advertising could identify specific differences and similarities in advertising strategies, expressions, and manifest cultural values, norms and stereotypes of the target audience and the larger culture. There is every reason to focus on advertising research. Due to the fact that the brewage and consumption of beer has a long history in both China and America and both countries are among the strongest advertising economies worldwide, a comparative study between these two is especially necessary.
As Price, Jewitt and Brown (2013) noted, multimodal analysis might seem impressionistic and thus a method of combining multimodality with corpora was more balanced. This thesis hereby aims at finding out the most persuasive modalities in beer advertising and thus throwing light on the way major beer producers and their products is conceptualized with the help of a comparative study undertaken from a bilingual perspective. Unsolved questions to be addressed are
1) what are the predominant conceptual metaphor(s) in American and Chinese beer advertising? And what are the mappings and entailments of these metaphors?
2) what modalities do the nations prefer respectively? Are there any cross-cultural variations?
3) can these metaphors reflect the culture of a certain country or do they only manifest that of the company or are they confined to the field of beer?
This study makes its contributions in several aspects. Firstly, as mentioned above this thesis can offer some insights into designing more effective cross-cultural advertising for entrepreneur, especially those who have been planning to launch their business in other countries. Secondly, it can help the audience better understand and distinguish between the implications behind the alluring propaganda, and thus make wiser decisions. Thirdly, through this thesis readers can gain a more comprehensive knowledge of the culture deluded from the two nations and their beer industries. Therefore, a more objective and all-round comment can be made. Lastly, since multimodal metaphor is a recently found phenomenon and its research has been rare this tentative attempt may, to some extent, offer some inspiration for the future study in the related fields, writ large.
1.3 Structure of the Thesis
To deal with the proceeding issues this thesis is generally divided into five chapters. Chapter one is the introduction part where a brief review about the purpose of the research and the layout of the thesis is given. Chapter two includes a detailed trace of the theories, which lays the theoretical foundation for this thesis and the methodology to be adopted. As the main body, chapter three is devoted to figuring out the multimodal conceptual metaphors in three categories, i.e. verbal, visual and sonic, in American and Chinese beer advertising respectively and then is followed by an exploration into the mappings and entailments of those metaphors. Afterwards, the preferred modalities in both nations are sorted out and analyzed to find their inclination in propaganda. And universality and cross-cultural variation is to be discussed in chapter four in terms of
similarities and differences. To conclude, the final chapter of this thesis involves major findings, points out limitations and sheds light on future research.
Chapter Two
LITERATURE REVIEW AND THEORETICAL
FRAMWORK
In this chapter an elaborate introduction of the two major theories, often adopted in advertising analyses, i.e. Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Multimodal Metaphor Theory, is provided, and studies concerned are offered. The key concepts governing this thesis are to be clarified.
2.1 Specific Notions
2.1.1 Beer advertising
Advertising is an attempt to influence the buying behavior of consumers by presenting selling messages about the product. Scholars paid attention to advertising
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research years ago. In The Language of Advertising (Vestergaard & Schrøde, 1985) the language, both the linguistic forms and their content in print advertising, was analyzed in a socio-linguistic approach. So far, it has undergone five stages of development, i.e., domestic, export, international, multi-national and global (Mike & Kristiann, 2004). It was once defined as “a public notice designed to spread information with a view to promoting the sales of marketable goods and services” (Harris & Seldon, 1997, p. 40). Courtland and Arens (2002, p. 7) noted that advertising was the non-personal exchanging of information which was usually persuasive and paid for about ideas or products (good and services) by identified sponsors through various media. From this definition we can conclude that the two main functions of advertising, that is, informing and persuading, are not of equal importance and in reality informing is second to persuading (Tanaka, 1994). The past decades have witnessed booming studies on advertising. Hermerén (1999) exerted efforts in discussing advertising language from the perspective of social and cognitive pragmatics. A video advertising can be rendered
as announcement, spot or message aired on television or the internet which is paid for by an advertiser. On this account, beer video advertising advocates beer on TV or other media and intends to persuade consumers into purchasing. Video advertising usually appears before, during, and/or after a video stream on the internet, or sometimes is served as a review of television counterparts. It is true that from the beer maker’s standpoint the success of advertising relies heavily on the central criterion: its impact on beer sales. However, to increase the selling figures a thorough survey on the market is inevitable so as to work out the better advertising strategies. Beer makers have been searching for the perfect advertising since long ago. Thanks to this heated trend, advertising or commercials have ever since been a concern for multi-disciplinary studies, ranging from marketing, social psychology to sociology and semiotics. Although studies related to advertising are mountainous, beer, probably one of the world’s oldest beverages, and its video advertising, have not been looked at deeply. There are few studies concerned. Strate (1991) studied the implications of beer commercials for social problems with the help of theory and research in popular culture
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and anthropology, semiotics and structuralism, and critical and cultural studies, and asserted that the myths found in beer advertising could be applied to social marketing campaigns. The image of women as sex objects and decoration in beer commercials was analyzed as well (Iijima & Crum, 1994). Dutch beer commercials were studied by Forceville (2008) from the perspective of multimodality. A comparative analysis of multimodal metaphors in beer commercials from the US and Ukraine was conducted in 2012 by Lantolf and Bobrova. O’Neil (2014) analyzed registers of authenticity in 153 beer commercials from eight countries by distinguishing four strategies of authentication, i.e. beer was associated with pre-industrial craftsmanship, naturalness, concrete locations and historical roots.
Similarly, in China discussions over beer advertising can be counted with one’s finger. Zu (2010) found both similarities and differences in the usage of appeals in the beer commercials of China and the USA, which was related to the product category and the cultural values in the country where the advertising were displayed. Guo (2013) conducted a semiotic analysis on Carlsberg’s TV Commercial.
As presented above video advertising can influence consumers in many ways and types for it “constitutes a body of texts and practices that is persuasive par excellence” (Forceville & Urios-Aparisi, 2009, p. 6). In spite of the limited studies, it is highly necessary to further the research.
2.1.2 Metaphor
Etymologically meaning “to carry over”, metaphor, has traditionally been related to such notions as “similarity” or “comparison” between the literal and the figurative meaning of an expression (Ungerer & Schmid, 1996, p. 115). Scholars’ interest in metaphors can be dated back to Aristotle. He defined metaphor as “the application of an alien name by transference either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or by analogy, that is proportion” (Aristotle, 2000, p. 28). Under the guidance of this classical view, the word “metaphor” is regarded to be “a novel or poetic linguistic expression” where a “similar” concept is expressed through one or more words by using them outside of its normal conventional meaning (Lakoff,
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2003, p. 202). It is criticized by many scholars that since Aristotle metaphor has conventionally been considered to be “a rhetorical device, a figure of speech, a tool in language, a device of poetic imagination, a deviant linguistic expression or ‘catachresis’, a matter of words rather than of thought or action” (Carver & Pikalo, 2008, p. 2). This situation did not necessarily change until the publication of Metaphors We Live By which will be further illustrated in next section. In this book metaphor means understanding one conceptual domain in terms of another. For millenniums humans have understood and interpreted the surrounding world by virtue of language. Language has since long been considered part and parcel of humans’ life. As an instrument of assigning human experiences into conceptual categories, language is far more than a mirror reflecting reality. Instead, it serves to impose structure on worldly perceptions with its characteristic of being highly selective (Lee, 1992). However, given the fact that present-day society is overwhelmed with more vehicles not limited to language itself it calls for further research on other vehicles.
By adopting Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory Tanaka (1994) attempted to explain the conventional verbal metaphor in advertising but at the meantime doubted the claim that conceptual metaphors were involved in humans’ thought. Using Bauman’s sociological commentary on liquid modernity, analyses indicated that framing the commercial interactions as “connections” was a more theoretically congruent lens for viewing buyers’ experiences (Blocker, 2012). Through studying the creative and novel multimodal metaphors in the Greek airliner commercials Tzanne (2013, p. 16) concluded that these metaphors displayed the generic features of multimodal metaphors identified in TV commercials generally, but violated the long-established genre-related convention that the target domain of the metaphor was in agreement with the advertised product.
Y. H. Zhao (2009) made an analysis of metaphor in commercials on the basis of Relevance Theory. N. Yu (2011) applied a decompositional approach to analyzing the central metaphor, “hosting the Beijing Olympics is performing Beijing opera on an international stage” in a CCTV educational advertising, as a metaphorical compound
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with its internal structures and components within the Chinese cultural context.
Advertising has been ubiquitous in daily life and the appeal of the advertisers tends to be manifested in a subtle or interesting way, which asks help from metaphors. As stated by Hermerén (1999) metaphors in advertising brought together various types of information by relating new information to already-known information in a rather implicit way. Thus the meaningfulness of studying metaphors in advertising is quite self-evident. However, the research on advertising metaphors are mostly confined to visual modality provided the fact that the world has become more diversified and virtual on the contrary, it is highly important to address the video advertising from a more comprehensive perspective.
2.2 Theoretical Framework
Studies in the past decades show that most advertising videos extend meanings by virtue of metaphors to which much attention has been paid. We might as well say that
advertising metaphor research has stepped into a relatively mature stage. Yet, as has been pinned out these studies mainly focus on monomodality, namely, visual or just written language. Thanks to the emergence of multimodality which, in Price’s (2013, p.
2) words, “opens up possibilities for recognizing, analyzing and theorizing the different ways in which people make meaning and how those meanings are interrelated” the exploration into advertising metaphors has crossed the traditional boundary of words. However, multimodal metaphor has not developed a specific set of sequential procedures (Yao & Chen, 2013) since its debut in 2007 and given the fact that beer advertising is a special kind of advertising, hence, a combination of Lakoff’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and Forceville’s Mutimodal Metaphor Theory (MMT) is a better choice.
In this thesis CMT shall supplements MMT with its detailed discussion over entailments and mappings. And also, to dig out the underpinned causes of the similarities and distinctions between the video advertising from two cultures, this thesis makes some speculations based on Kövecses’ case studies.
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2.2.1 Conceptual metaphor theory
2.2.1.1 Components of conceptual metaphor
Conceptual metaphor consists of source and target domains, mapping, entailment, etc. Lakoff (2003) explained that source domain referred to the conceptual domain from which we drew metaphorical expressions (e.g., love is a journey) while target domain meant the conceptual domain that we tried to understand (e.g., love is a journey).
Metaphor, defined as a general cognitive mechanism, involves the interaction between different domains of experience (Lakoff, 2003). Thus a mapping is the systematic set of correspondences that exist between constituent elements of the source and the target domain. Take the conceptual metaphor “LOVE IS JOURNEY” as an example. In this metaphor, mappings include:
travelers→lovers
vehicle→love relationship
destination→purpose of the relationship
distance covered→progress made in the relationship
obstacles along the way→difficulties encountered in the relationship
(Lakoff, 2003) Source domains often map ideas onto the target beyond the basic correspondences. According to Lakoff (2003, p. 10) metaphorical concepts are usually based on subcategorization (e.g., TIME IS MONEY based on “money is a limited resource” and “time is a valuable commodity”). These additional mappings or subcategorization relationships are called entailments, or inferences. Similarly, we progress with the love example. If love is conceptualized as a journey and the vehicle corresponds to the relationship, then our knowledge about the vehicle can be applied to comprehending love relationships.
If the vehicle breaks down, we have three choices: 1)we get out and try to
reach our destination by some other means; 2)we try to fix it; 3)we stay in it
and do nothing. Correspondingly, if a love relationship does not work, we can
also have three choices: 1)leave the relationship; 2)try to make it work; 3)stay
in it and suffer. (Unger & Schmidt, 1996)
2.2.1.2 Research on conceptual metaphor abroad
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The milestone in cognitive conception of metaphor may widely be thought to have sprung out from Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By in which they proposed Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT)—“the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (2003, p. 5). This definition challenged the long-held common view of metaphor as a “device of the poetic imagination and the rhetoric flourish” (2003, p. 6). Since then many linguists have contributed to its development. Ungerer and Schmid (1996, pp. 118-121) demonstrated that by virtue of the structural mapping process from source domain to target domain metaphors allowed us to conceptualize abstract phenomena through our concrete worlds.
However, CMT concentrated on verbal language while Lakoff and Johnson held that “metaphor... [is] not a figure of speech, but a mode of thought” (2003, p. 153). Now that language is only one of the modes humans communicate, other modes (or modalities) should be taken into account as well.。