The Visual Metonymy in Japanese Children’s Books Intended for Two Levels of Reader's Age: A Multimodal Approach

Abstract

This research aims to investigate the function of visual metonymy (supported by verbal metonymy) in a Japanese-language storybook for children, categorized into two levels of reader's age. The storybook used is a recommendation from the Japanese Board on Books for Young People and meets the standard of the quality book according to the award of Hans Christian Anderson. The author applied two approaches, namely metonymy from a cognitive linguistic perspective and metonymy from a social semiotic perspective. The social semiotic perspective was used to identify the character manifestation by applying theory from Painter et al. (2014) as the development of theory from Kress & van Leeuwen (2020). A cognitive linguistic perspective was used to analyze the relevance between the source domain and a target domain and to map the domain-internal nature of metonymic based on Forceville (2009); Ruiz de Mendoza & Diez Velasco (2003). The next analysis step was to process data, namely the amount of character manifestation in the storybook and two levels of reader's age, by using Chi-square test software. This step was performed to see whether or not there is a relation between these two variables. This research used a mixed method, as stated by Creswell (2020). The research shows the result that character manifestation that is completely illustrated is found more frequently in storybooks intended for readers at the age of zero to five. Meanwhile, character manifestation that is illustrated in metonymies is more frequently found in storybooks intended for readers at the age of six to ten. The whole metonymies in the storybook can be mapped into source-in-target metonymies. Based on the data interpretation processed with Chi-square test software, it generally shows a relationship that is significant between visual metonymies in the storybook and the age level of readers. Thus, it can be concluded that the function of visual metonymies in Japanese-language storybooks was used to highlight essential aspects of characters and story plot and to establish a bond between characters in the book and readers. Besides, the emergence of the visual metonymies in the storybook considers the target age of readers.