My goal in the chapter is to examine a variety of visual experiences that appear to evoke visual metaphors. This is a range of experience types that extends from “sign-like” visual experiences to “non-sign-like” visual experiences. I propose that visual metaphors are evoked by paintings through winner’s podiums all the way to cityscapes and scenes in nature. The latter two (non-sign-like) cases, cityscapes and natural scenes, are not commonly subjected to serious examination from a CMT perspective. However, they provide us with new challenges in the study of visual metaphors, since they greatly extend the range of visual experience that might give rise to visual metaphors. I suggest, further, that the comprehension or interpretation of all of these visual experiences, including sign-like and non-sign-like alike, makes use of the same metaphorical processing mechanisms. The visual metaphors that are evoked by visual experiences can be based either on correlations or resemblance.
What is the relation between the three following elements: words, pictures, and conceptual representations? And how do these three elements work, in defining and explaining metaphors? These are the questions that we tackle in our interdisciplinary contribution, which moves across cognitive linguistics, cognitive sciences, philosophy and semiotics. Within the cognitive linguistic tradition, scholars have assumed that there are equivalent and comparable structures characterizing the way in which metaphor works in language and in pictures. In this chapter we analyze contextual visual metaphors, which are considered to be the most complex ones, and we compare them to those that in language are called indirect metaphors. Our proposal is that a syllogistic mechanism of comprehension permeates both metaphors expressed in the verbal modality as well as metaphors expressed in the pictorial modality. While in the verbal modality the metaphoric syllogism is solved by inference, we argue that in the pictorial modality the role of inference is performed through mental imagery.
This chapter proposes to define metaphor as a visual-material structure, the sphere of which is ontological rather than cognitive or conceptual. It argues that the essence of metaphor, as either an aesthetic or a communicative unit or both, resides in the qualitative dimension and appearance, or even materiality, of the metaphorical medium and its form. The chapter thus offers a new theory of metaphor, focusing on the medium of metaphor, which composes and transfigures or reconstructs its target anew: a composition that is prior to understanding or conceptualizing the target. In doing so, the chapter presents a formalist ontology of metaphors, established via an externalist account of metaphors, as opposed to the prevailing cognitivistconceptualist account which I characterize as internalist. The various kinds of metaphor – linguistic, poetic, visual or material – are based on their external structure, rather than an internal-conceptual mechanism of understanding, as assumed by a significant segment of the literature. Visual metaphor, therefore, is the paradigmatic kind of metaphor, the analysis of which can be generalized to other kinds of metaphor.
Furthermore, the chapter tries to overcome the current discrepancy between the formalist character of the metaphorical medium and the dominance of cognitivist and conceptualist theories of metaphor. Challenging these, I claim that if the identity of metaphor is indeed based on its composition, then it is actually based on its aesthetic qualities. That is to say, not only are there autonomous visual or material metaphors, that are not based on linguistic or conceptual ones, but linguistic and conceptual metaphors are based on visuality: they are enabled by the structural possibilities offered by visual media.
Conceptual Metaphor Theory’s central idea that metaphor is a figure of thought rather than a figure of language has led to the examination of nonverbal and multimodal manifestations of metaphor. Over the past twenty years, the verbal trope of metonymy has similarly been theorized from a conceptual point of view, but the implications of this work for visual studies have only begun to be examined. Investigating visual manifestations of metonymy will moreover also improve our understanding of visual metaphor, as often these latter depend on, and interact with, metonymies. In this chapter we propose to explore the interaction of metaphor and metonymy in the visual/multimodal realm of print advertising, using Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza and Olga Díez’ (2002) typology, and building on Paula Peréz-Sobrino’s (2017) applications of this typology. Our twofold aim is (1) to see if, and if so, how, all patterns of this typology appear in ads; and (2) to investigate a number of Iranian and Dutch print advertisements in which metaphor and metonymy interact. Analyzing ads from two cultures will enable us to demonstrate how cultural background knowledge is essential for understanding metaphor-metonymy interactions.
In this chapter I have a twofold aim: (1) to reveal the complexity of the concept of love in Hungarian folklore by analyzing a number of its linguistic (oral-verbal) and visual representations side by side; and (2) to decipher these two modes of expression in light of each other, with the help of Conceptual Metaphor Theory. The reason for doing so is that folkloric artefacts and folk poetry are two different self-expressional modes of a community; therefore, if their symbolism represents certain aspects of the same concept, it enables us to get a more complex view on the concept itself, as well as to explore and compare the different modes the messages are conveyed by.
Texts of folk songs and the patterns, structure and functions of the hope chest, an artefact that played an essential role in a woman’s life in Hungarian folklore, are analyzed in line with each other. I propose that the model of love revealed by folk poetry and folk art is thoroughly intertwined with the concepts of morality, marriage and life, reflecting an optimistic view of the world that extends the bounderies of this earthly life. Furthermore, I argue that both the linguistic and visual representations under scrutiny are manifestations of a coordinating view of the world, which is present in the form of both coordinated source and coordinated target representations. The conceptual disparity between the two modes lies mainly in the static nature of folk art and the dynamicity of language, but the creativity of the studied community seems to surmount this issue by imparting ornaments with a functional value.
The chapter aims at analyzing visual metaphors and allegories in the fine arts – particularly in the symbolic paintings by J. Malczewski – as creative tools of both artistic expression and discourse storytelling in which they play a vital role. Visual metaphors are suggestive and effective in artistic performance and, therefore, in communicating abstract ideas to the individual viewer and the public. Such paintings (symbolic and surrealistic), whilst encompassing concrete (source) and universal (target) domains in their depicted metaphoric structures, can be powerful enough to create possible and alternative courses of events. Based on the analysis of R. Arnheim’s concept of openness of fine art works, J. Bruner’s theory of narrative mind, storytelling and possible worlds, and Ch. Forceville’s analyses of visual metaphors, the chapter will attempt to answer the following two philosophical and epistemological questions: (1) how universal themes are depicted, perceived, conveyed, and comprehended in metaphorical paintings; and (2) what is the difference between the structures of the visual metaphors characteristic for these paintings and merely literary parabolic means. Both conceptual metaphors and blending theories are used in the analyses of selected symbolic and metaphoric paintings by Malczewski to explain in what scope his painting methods and their narrative structures are entangled in Polish national-cultural history, and how important they are in cognitive studies as well as in the history and theory of fine arts.
This chapter studies the visual representation of the Treaty of Trianon by identifying the most common image metaphors related to it. Three hypotheses are articulated. (1) Visual metaphors about Trianon are based on the same underlying conceptual metaphors as the corresponding metaphorical linguistic expressions. However, it is proposed that figures tend to be construed of mixed metaphors in order to convey a more condensed and complex message. In case of mixed metaphors, more source domains are applied to conceptualize the same target domain. (2) There exists a cultural cognition (Sharifian 2011) about Trianon, which is shared by the contemporary Hungarian community and which is represented in different modes of communication, namely in language and in images. The members of the community are able to understand and (re-)produce the linguistic and image metaphors about Trianon, because their conceptual system about Trianon is structured by similar conceptual metaphors. (3) Furthermore, based on linguistic data Putz (2019), it is assumed that the figures represent the perspective of the post-1920 Hungarian nation exclusively.
The data is based on a Google search conducted on January 15, 2019, which referenced figures of Trianon with a .hu internet domain. Among the hundreds of thousands of search results, the first 150 figures were selected and ordered into six categories. Among this set of figures, the analysis focused on illustrations based on maps of pre- and post-1920 Hungary. The chapter provides an in-depth analysis of eight figures, based on a three-step procedure, which is motivated by Steen et al.’s (2017) protocol.
The chapter presents a case study of how the use of multiple parallel texts may be employed as a useful research method in cognitive poetics, using the English version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and its four published Czech versions as the samples. In the analysis, we examine the language of space in alternative verbalizations of the same literary scene across languages (English and Czech) and within the target language (Czech), and the different mental images invoked by the different ways of verbalizing the same scene. Our analysis shows that the use of multiple parallel texts can be a helpful research method in cognitive poetics, in the sense that the method is capable of providing naturalistic and representative linguistic evidence of how languages systematically differ, even for a domain as basic as space.
Conventionalized positive images of Hungary have been overemphasized in political caricatures ever since the nineteenth century (Tamás 2012, 2014). The present chapter explores the multimodal representations of hungary in cartoons in the period between 1989 and 1990, during which negative images of Hungary became prominent due to the weak financial situation of the country and the political system change. The corpus involves seventyfive cartoons from the satirical magazine Ludas Matyi. Two major claims are justified by adopting Paula Pérez-Sobrino’s (2017) multimodal identification procedure: (1) the interpretation of verbal elements (e.g., labels, verbal texts, and verbal symbols) in political cartoons influences the identification of multimodal conceptual patterns; (2) the dominant patterns that structure the representation of hungary in political cartoons are metonymy-based visual and multimodal metaphors, and both of them occur in metaphorical scenarios. The corpus analysis indicates that the two main target frames, financial crisis and political changes, appear through the sources of human body and object in metaphorical scenarios, such as ordinary scenes, motion, hospital, sport, tale, love, feast, stunt, begging, and church scenes. Apart from identifying the representations of Hungary, visual metonymies as well as textual cues need to be revealed in order to understand what metaphtonymy scenarios are intended in the cartoons.
The chapter presents an in-depth analysis of the language of death in Chinese and discusses the relation between language and occupation as a social factor in analyzing the language of death. In this chapter, I address in what specific ways Cognitive Linguistics may serve as a useful analytical framework in studying Chinese idioms used in funerals, in an attempt to uncover cultural elements and viewpoint structure in communicating death. The study introduces basic constructs in Cognitive Linguistics which could be used for such an analysis, and applies this CL machinery to analyzing three selected groups of four-character eulogistic idioms used at funerals in Taiwan. The analysis shows that, in addition to Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which has been considered the classic CL tool for studying abstract concepts like death, the subjectivity/objectivity distinction in Cognitive Grammar may also be employed as a complementary and useful theoretical construct in studying the language of death, as it helps identify the special characteristics of the eulogistic idioms for teachers as a special profession in the Chinese culture.
My goal in the chapter is to examine a variety of visual experiences that appear to evoke visual metaphors. This is a range of experience types that extends from “sign-like” visual experiences to “non-sign-like” visual experiences. I propose that visual metaphors are evoked by paintings through winner’s podiums all the way to cityscapes and scenes in nature. The latter two (non-sign-like) cases, cityscapes and natural scenes, are not commonly subjected to serious examination from a CMT perspective. However, they provide us with new challenges in the study of visual metaphors, since they greatly extend the range of visual experience that might give rise to visual metaphors. I suggest, further, that the comprehension or interpretation of all of these visual experiences, including sign-like and non-sign-like alike, makes use of the same metaphorical processing mechanisms. The visual metaphors that are evoked by visual experiences can be based either on correlations or resemblance.
What is the relation between the three following elements: words, pictures, and conceptual representations? And how do these three elements work, in defining and explaining metaphors? These are the questions that we tackle in our interdisciplinary contribution, which moves across cognitive linguistics, cognitive sciences, philosophy and semiotics. Within the cognitive linguistic tradition, scholars have assumed that there are equivalent and comparable structures characterizing the way in which metaphor works in language and in pictures. In this chapter we analyze contextual visual metaphors, which are considered to be the most complex ones, and we compare them to those that in language are called indirect metaphors. Our proposal is that a syllogistic mechanism of comprehension permeates both metaphors expressed in the verbal modality as well as metaphors expressed in the pictorial modality. While in the verbal modality the metaphoric syllogism is solved by inference, we argue that in the pictorial modality the role of inference is performed through mental imagery.
This chapter proposes to define metaphor as a visual-material structure, the sphere of which is ontological rather than cognitive or conceptual. It argues that the essence of metaphor, as either an aesthetic or a communicative unit or both, resides in the qualitative dimension and appearance, or even materiality, of the metaphorical medium and its form. The chapter thus offers a new theory of metaphor, focusing on the medium of metaphor, which composes and transfigures or reconstructs its target anew: a composition that is prior to understanding or conceptualizing the target. In doing so, the chapter presents a formalist ontology of metaphors, established via an externalist account of metaphors, as opposed to the prevailing cognitivistconceptualist account which I characterize as internalist. The various kinds of metaphor – linguistic, poetic, visual or material – are based on their external structure, rather than an internal-conceptual mechanism of understanding, as assumed by a significant segment of the literature. Visual metaphor, therefore, is the paradigmatic kind of metaphor, the analysis of which can be generalized to other kinds of metaphor.
Furthermore, the chapter tries to overcome the current discrepancy between the formalist character of the metaphorical medium and the dominance of cognitivist and conceptualist theories of metaphor. Challenging these, I claim that if the identity of metaphor is indeed based on its composition, then it is actually based on its aesthetic qualities. That is to say, not only are there autonomous visual or material metaphors, that are not based on linguistic or conceptual ones, but linguistic and conceptual metaphors are based on visuality: they are enabled by the structural possibilities offered by visual media.
Conceptual Metaphor Theory’s central idea that metaphor is a figure of thought rather than a figure of language has led to the examination of nonverbal and multimodal manifestations of metaphor. Over the past twenty years, the verbal trope of metonymy has similarly been theorized from a conceptual point of view, but the implications of this work for visual studies have only begun to be examined. Investigating visual manifestations of metonymy will moreover also improve our understanding of visual metaphor, as often these latter depend on, and interact with, metonymies. In this chapter we propose to explore the interaction of metaphor and metonymy in the visual/multimodal realm of print advertising, using Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza and Olga Díez’ (2002) typology, and building on Paula Peréz-Sobrino’s (2017) applications of this typology. Our twofold aim is (1) to see if, and if so, how, all patterns of this typology appear in ads; and (2) to investigate a number of Iranian and Dutch print advertisements in which metaphor and metonymy interact. Analyzing ads from two cultures will enable us to demonstrate how cultural background knowledge is essential for understanding metaphor-metonymy interactions.
In this chapter I have a twofold aim: (1) to reveal the complexity of the concept of love in Hungarian folklore by analyzing a number of its linguistic (oral-verbal) and visual representations side by side; and (2) to decipher these two modes of expression in light of each other, with the help of Conceptual Metaphor Theory. The reason for doing so is that folkloric artefacts and folk poetry are two different self-expressional modes of a community; therefore, if their symbolism represents certain aspects of the same concept, it enables us to get a more complex view on the concept itself, as well as to explore and compare the different modes the messages are conveyed by.
Texts of folk songs and the patterns, structure and functions of the hope chest, an artefact that played an essential role in a woman’s life in Hungarian folklore, are analyzed in line with each other. I propose that the model of love revealed by folk poetry and folk art is thoroughly intertwined with the concepts of morality, marriage and life, reflecting an optimistic view of the world that extends the bounderies of this earthly life. Furthermore, I argue that both the linguistic and visual representations under scrutiny are manifestations of a coordinating view of the world, which is present in the form of both coordinated source and coordinated target representations. The conceptual disparity between the two modes lies mainly in the static nature of folk art and the dynamicity of language, but the creativity of the studied community seems to surmount this issue by imparting ornaments with a functional value.
The chapter aims at analyzing visual metaphors and allegories in the fine arts – particularly in the symbolic paintings by J. Malczewski – as creative tools of both artistic expression and discourse storytelling in which they play a vital role. Visual metaphors are suggestive and effective in artistic performance and, therefore, in communicating abstract ideas to the individual viewer and the public. Such paintings (symbolic and surrealistic), whilst encompassing concrete (source) and universal (target) domains in their depicted metaphoric structures, can be powerful enough to create possible and alternative courses of events. Based on the analysis of R. Arnheim’s concept of openness of fine art works, J. Bruner’s theory of narrative mind, storytelling and possible worlds, and Ch. Forceville’s analyses of visual metaphors, the chapter will attempt to answer the following two philosophical and epistemological questions: (1) how universal themes are depicted, perceived, conveyed, and comprehended in metaphorical paintings; and (2) what is the difference between the structures of the visual metaphors characteristic for these paintings and merely literary parabolic means. Both conceptual metaphors and blending theories are used in the analyses of selected symbolic and metaphoric paintings by Malczewski to explain in what scope his painting methods and their narrative structures are entangled in Polish national-cultural history, and how important they are in cognitive studies as well as in the history and theory of fine arts.
This chapter studies the visual representation of the Treaty of Trianon by identifying the most common image metaphors related to it. Three hypotheses are articulated. (1) Visual metaphors about Trianon are based on the same underlying conceptual metaphors as the corresponding metaphorical linguistic expressions. However, it is proposed that figures tend to be construed of mixed metaphors in order to convey a more condensed and complex message. In case of mixed metaphors, more source domains are applied to conceptualize the same target domain. (2) There exists a cultural cognition (Sharifian 2011) about Trianon, which is shared by the contemporary Hungarian community and which is represented in different modes of communication, namely in language and in images. The members of the community are able to understand and (re-)produce the linguistic and image metaphors about Trianon, because their conceptual system about Trianon is structured by similar conceptual metaphors. (3) Furthermore, based on linguistic data Putz (2019), it is assumed that the figures represent the perspective of the post-1920 Hungarian nation exclusively.
The data is based on a Google search conducted on January 15, 2019, which referenced figures of Trianon with a .hu internet domain. Among the hundreds of thousands of search results, the first 150 figures were selected and ordered into six categories. Among this set of figures, the analysis focused on illustrations based on maps of pre- and post-1920 Hungary. The chapter provides an in-depth analysis of eight figures, based on a three-step procedure, which is motivated by Steen et al.’s (2017) protocol.
The chapter presents a case study of how the use of multiple parallel texts may be employed as a useful research method in cognitive poetics, using the English version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and its four published Czech versions as the samples. In the analysis, we examine the language of space in alternative verbalizations of the same literary scene across languages (English and Czech) and within the target language (Czech), and the different mental images invoked by the different ways of verbalizing the same scene. Our analysis shows that the use of multiple parallel texts can be a helpful research method in cognitive poetics, in the sense that the method is capable of providing naturalistic and representative linguistic evidence of how languages systematically differ, even for a domain as basic as space.
Conventionalized positive images of Hungary have been overemphasized in political caricatures ever since the nineteenth century (Tamás 2012, 2014). The present chapter explores the multimodal representations of hungary in cartoons in the period between 1989 and 1990, during which negative images of Hungary became prominent due to the weak financial situation of the country and the political system change. The corpus involves seventyfive cartoons from the satirical magazine Ludas Matyi. Two major claims are justified by adopting Paula Pérez-Sobrino’s (2017) multimodal identification procedure: (1) the interpretation of verbal elements (e.g., labels, verbal texts, and verbal symbols) in political cartoons influences the identification of multimodal conceptual patterns; (2) the dominant patterns that structure the representation of hungary in political cartoons are metonymy-based visual and multimodal metaphors, and both of them occur in metaphorical scenarios. The corpus analysis indicates that the two main target frames, financial crisis and political changes, appear through the sources of human body and object in metaphorical scenarios, such as ordinary scenes, motion, hospital, sport, tale, love, feast, stunt, begging, and church scenes. Apart from identifying the representations of Hungary, visual metonymies as well as textual cues need to be revealed in order to understand what metaphtonymy scenarios are intended in the cartoons.
The chapter presents an in-depth analysis of the language of death in Chinese and discusses the relation between language and occupation as a social factor in analyzing the language of death. In this chapter, I address in what specific ways Cognitive Linguistics may serve as a useful analytical framework in studying Chinese idioms used in funerals, in an attempt to uncover cultural elements and viewpoint structure in communicating death. The study introduces basic constructs in Cognitive Linguistics which could be used for such an analysis, and applies this CL machinery to analyzing three selected groups of four-character eulogistic idioms used at funerals in Taiwan. The analysis shows that, in addition to Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which has been considered the classic CL tool for studying abstract concepts like death, the subjectivity/objectivity distinction in Cognitive Grammar may also be employed as a complementary and useful theoretical construct in studying the language of death, as it helps identify the special characteristics of the eulogistic idioms for teachers as a special profession in the Chinese culture.