A large number of literary classics have been transformed into comic works with varied adaptation strategies. As a typical example, Cai Zhizhong’s comic adaptation of Journey to the West has made successful attempts in rewriting the story with modern elements that carry socio-cultural values. Under the general theoretical frameworks of social semiotics, this article seeks to explain what and how these elements are presented and explore how such elements are infused with values that affiliate people of different communities and provoke thoughts on cultural diversity and global issues. It is found that (a) modern elements have been presented with particular ideational, interpersonal, and textual semiotic options and (b) different values have been implanted into these elements through bondicons, iconization, and visual attitudes.
While modern adaptations of Chinese classics have drawn keen scholarly interests lately, the comic adaptation of Chinese traditional poetry remains under-investigated. Extending the previous research on intersemiotic translation and comics, this paper, drawing on the analytical framework of systemic functional semiotics, examines distribution of process types of language in poems in comparison with that in comic images in the exemplary case drawn by Cai Zhizhong, using UAM image as the annotation tool. The comic book formulates a multimodal corpus that consists of 1,097 clauses and 605 images. We have manually analyzed the process type of the poems and their corresponding comic panels. Our quantitative and qualitative results show that there are distinct patterns of process-type distributions between verbal poems and images. Poems have been turned into perceptions, actions, and verbal processes in comic strips, which serve various purposes such as construction of the poet’s gaze, relations building, storyline development, dramatization, metaphor visualization, etc. The paper is concluded with discussion on how the intersemiotic translation of poems might produce effects on readers.
The concept of multimodal metaphor has generated a growing body of literature over the past decades. However, a systemic review of the domain seems to be lacking in relevant literature. This study, therefore, is an attempt to conduct a bibliometric analysis of the field of multimodal metaphor during 1977–2022, with a focus on 397 relevant publications retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) with the visualization tool VOSviewer. Some major quantitative findings are: (i) the number of publications in multimodal research began to surge in 2010 upon the seminal work of Forceville’s (2009); (ii) USA, China and Spain are the most productive countries; (iii) journals in the field of advertising, communication and linguistics are important sources of publications; and (iv) eleven clusters of keywords are identified, such as “visual metaphor”, “persuasion”, “pictures”, “impact”, “multimodal metaphor”, “model”, etc., representing crucial areas of interests. We also identified, by qualitative observations, three research trends in multimodal metaphor, driven by cognitive linguistic theory, the theory of pragmatics and visual/multimodal rhetoric theory, respectively. Various theoretical perspectives may shed light on possible further research on multimodal metaphor.
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