Metonymy, metaphor, and multimodal civic meaning-making in children’s tax-themed postcards

Abstract

This article investigates how Japanese elementary school students construct civic meaning through multimodal metaphor and metonymy in tax-themed postcards submitted to a public contest. Drawing on Relevance Theory, Cognitive Linguistics, and Multimodal Discourse Analysis, the study analyzes six configuration-based focal cases selected from a larger corpus of postcards produced for a regional civic-education contest. These visual-verbal compositions are examined for how they optimize relevance, balancing strong explicatures (e.g., institutional icons, labeled slogans) with weak implicatures (e.g., symbolic figures, layout cues) to convey abstract fiscal concepts. Through metonymy, metaphor, and metonymy–metaphor interplay, children not only reference but recontextualize civic messages, expressing evaluative stances on public contribution, mutual benefit, and social care. The analysis identifies recurrent patterns in how metonymy, metaphor, and their interplay are distributed across verbal and visual modes. Verbal metonymy tends to be visually grounded while verbal metaphor is rarely left unsupported, suggesting a pragmatic sensitivity to communicative coherence. The study advances multimodal pragmatics by foregrounding children’s intuitive rhetorical design and offers insights into how young learners recontextualize institutionally framed civic discourse through multimodal meaning-making.