A Study on Chinese Culture in High School English Textbooks of BNUP from the Perspective of Conceptual Blending Theory for Multimodal Metaphors

Abstract

At the end of the 20th century, scholars represented by Forceville dived into the construction and representation of metaphors using various modalities, leading the shift of metaphor studies towards multimodality, which consequently put the study of multimodal metaphors in the spotlight. English textbooks, as a combination of visual and linguistic modes of expression, contain a large number of metaphors. From the perspective of conceptual blending theory, the paper explores the construction and meaning of multimodal metaphors of Chinese culture in three compulsory high school English textbooks of Beijing Normal University Press. It is found that these three compulsory high school English textbooks of Beijing Normal University Press (BNUP) contain many multimodal metaphors of Chinese culture, and these multimodal metaphors can activate student’s cultural background knowledge and convey the communicative intention of the pictures, thus arousing students’ interest in Chinese culture and fostering cultural confidence.