What is it about?
We analyze five Chinese clips that promote Chinese cities and/or a trade fair in a Chinese city. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate to scholars outside of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Metonymy paradigm how these two tropes cue meaning verbally, visually, musically, sonically, and multimodally in five Chinese clips promoting Chinese cities and Chinese trade fairs, all produced after, and in the spirit of, president Xi Jinping’s “Belt and Road” initiative (2013).
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Why is it important?
President Xi Jinping’s “Belt and Road,” launched in the autumn of 2013. One way in which this is done is via video clips that advertise big Chinese cities and international trade fairs organized in these cities. Whereas the clips’ primary aim appears to be to showcase the cities’ attractions to companies considering to set up business as well as to prospective foreign tourists, the fact that the clips are bilingual makes clear that they are intended to enthuse both global and Chinese audiences.
Perspectives
By publishing this paper not in a specialist journal but in Intercultural Pragmatics, we intend to persuade students of culture that metaphor and metonymy are good instruments to analyse visual and multimodal discourses. Moreover, it is important that the study of metaphor and metonymy, which has over the past decades attracted many scholars, is complemented with researching other mechanisms. If this is not done, either the concepts of metaphor and metonymy are so stretched in order to accommodate all relevant meaning that they lose all explanatory power; or a lot of pertinent meaning is simply missed or ignored.
Dr Charles Forceville
Universiteit van Amsterdam
Metonymy and metaphor are fundamental and ubiquitous meaning generating tropes that operate on a conceptual, not just a verbal, level.
Prof. Yue Guan
Nanfang College. Guangzhou
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Making cross-cultural meaning in five Chinese promotion clips: Metonymies and metaphors, Intercultural Pragmatics, April 2020, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/ip-2020-0007.
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Making cross-cultural meaning in five Chinese promotion clips: Metonymies and metaphors
Pre-print, open access version of paper
Link to paper on the journal's website
Metonymy and metaphor are fundamental and ubiquitous meaning-generating tropes that operate on a conceptual, not just a verbal, level. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate to scholars outside of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Metonymy paradigm how these two tropes cue meaning verbally, visually, musically, sonically, and multimodally in five Chinese clips promoting Chinese cities and Chinese trade fairs, all produced after, and in the spirit of, president Xi Jinping’s “Belt and Road” initiative (2013). We also pay attention to how interpretations are to some extent bound to differ depending on whether the audience does or does not have detailed knowledge of Chinese culture. We end by briefly arguing that a full analysis of the clips – as indeed of most discourses – requires awareness of yet other tropes as well as expertise in other humanities disciplines. Keywords: conceptual metonymy; conceptual metaphor; multimodal tropes; Chinese promotional clips
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