A Multimodal Metaphor Analysis of WeChat Emoticon From the Perspective of Visual Grammar

Abstract

The WeChat emoticon in China is a multimodal discourse comprising words, pictures, and other symbols. It figuratively represents communication purposes using static symbols, such as words and images and dynamic symbols, such as animation, in synchronisation with both parties' perceptive abilities. This paper analyses the construction of multimodal metaphors with WeChat emoticons as the corpus, based on the three meta-functional theories of visual grammar and the concept of cognitive linguistics, to improve communicators' metaphorical understanding of emoticons and thus promote communication.