This study examines the environmental campaign posters and character designs produced by the Chinese company POP MART through the analytical lens of cognitive linguistics. In particular, it employs three theoretical frameworks—conceptual metaphor, conceptual blending, and image schema—to investigate how cognitive mechanisms operate in the interpretation of multimodal texts. The primary aim of the study is to elucidate the processes of meaning construction that underlie POP MART’s advertising posters and character representations. The analysis demonstrates that a variety of metaphorical expressions appear across both the posters and the characters, arising from multiple types of conceptual blending and giving rise to emergent meanings. Furthermore, the study identifies three salient patterns through which the “center–periphery” image schema is realized in the poster designs. Overall, the findings indicate that cognitive linguistics, through the frameworks of conceptual metaphor, conceptual blending, and image schema, offers an effective theoretical approach for analyzing meaning construction in multimodal discourse. This study suggests that meaning-oriented cognitive linguistic methodologies hold considerable potential for examining the increasingly diverse forms of media in contemporary society.
Liu et al. (Wed,) studied this question.