Xiaoben Yuan
List of John Benjamins publications in which Xiaoben Yuan is involved.
2026 Metonymy, metaphor, and multimodal civic meaning-making in children’s tax-themed postcards Pragmatics and Society: Online-First Articles | Article
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… read more
2025 Various ways of supporting society: Decoding the tax is support metaphor in Japanese children’s multimodal expressions Cognitive Linguistic Studies 12:2, pp. 322–345 | Article
This study sheds light on how Japanese children conceptualize taxation through creative metaphors, offering insights into their cognitive development and societal understanding. Specifically, the research investigates the most prevalent metaphor, tax is support, identified through the analysis… read more
2023 Metaphors and metonymies in the multimodal discourse of whaling: A cross genre comparative study Metaphor and the Social World 13:2, pp. 293–315 | Article
Metaphors and metonymies are considered complex phenomena dependent on various factors. This paper looks at genre (as one of the many factors) to verify to what extent the subjective descriptions of a highly controversial and complex social topic such as whaling can be driven by discourse type.… read more
Planting tax: Growth metaphors in Japanese children’s multimodal conceptualization of taxation Metaphor and the Social World: Online-First Articles | Article
This study examines how Japanese sixth-grade children aged 11–12 use multimodal metaphor to conceptualise taxation in a public civic contest. While previous studies have shown that children use metaphor to construct meaning, much less is known about how children use image and short text to… read more