Author(s)

Hui Wang ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ Department of English, School of Foreign Languages, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing, 100083, China

Corresponding Author

Hui Wang

ABSTRACT

In the contemporary era of deep integration between digitization and globalization, short videos have become a primary medium for cross-cultural communication. Through the multimodal weaving of audiovisual signs, they can trigger cognitive resonance and emotional consensus at multiple levels. This study employs multimodal metaphor theory from multimodal discourse analysis, and uses Li Ziqi's five most-viewed videos on YouTube as research objects. Combining multimodal annotation using ELAN with audience commentary analysis, it systematically examines folk media's metaphor generation mechanism through multimodal collaboration and its cultural dissemination effects from the perspective of cross-cultural communication. The study finds that this folk media's metaphor generation through multimodal collaboration follows a three-layer progressive mechanism: visual-linguistic collaboration accomplishes semantic anchoring of surface-level cultural symbols; visual-auditory collaboration triggers audience's embodied cognition at the level of perceiving cultural symbols; visual-editing and auditory-editing collaborations internalize deep cultural metaphors within the audience's emotional experience. The "cognition-perception-emotion" analytical framework constructed in this study clarifies the specific mechanism by which folk media dissects deep cultural metaphors into concrete and perceptible audiovisual expressions. It provides a refined analytical tool for understanding the "lifeworld translation" of Chinese culture in the context of globalization, and also provides modal configuration ideas and content balancing strategies that can be used as a reference for other video creators committed to cross-cultural expression.

KEYWORDS

Cross-cultural communication; Folk media; Li Ziqi; Multimodal metaphor; Modal collaboration

CITE THIS PAPER

Hui Wang. The Mechanism of Metaphor Generation and Meaning Construction through Multimodal Collaboration: A Case Study of Folk Media Li Ziqi in Cross-Cultural Communication. Media and Communication Research (2026). Vol. 7, No. 2, 19-28. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/mediacr.2026.070203.

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