A Comparison of Multimodal Metaphors in Chinese and Foreign Liquor Advertisements

In this paper, two commercial advertisements for alcoholic beverages are selected as the corpus, and based on the introduction of the idealized cognitive model, the author further analyzes the characteristics and recognition and interpretation mechanisms of multimodal metaphors, and examines the similarities and differences of multimodal metaphors in these two English-Chinese commercial advertisements for alcoholic beverages. It was found that, firstly, the two English-Chinese commercial advertisements for alcoholic beverages used multiple modalities such as images, words and music to construct the metaphor between the origin and target domains of alcoholic beverages. Second, a large number of multimodal metaphors in the advertisements are mainly reflected in sensory metaphors, in which visual and auditory metaphors play an important role, followed by event metaphors. Due to the differences in the messages conveyed by the designers of the two advertisements, the origin domains of the modal metaphors also show strong differences: 1) both Chinese and foreign advertisements use visual and auditory modalities, but the emphasis of the symbols within the modalities is different; 2) the differences in the mechanism of the metaphors are mainly due to the differences in cognition and culture; and 3) the multimodal metaphors are really different from the purely linguistic metaphors.