Figuring out Figuration

“Peña-Cervel and Ruiz de Mendoza's book, which has an impressive bibliography, is a daring and robust step in the invaluable project of developing a modern, cognitivist-oriented trope framework. The authors admirably dare to adapt, or even by-pass, older views to explain how the various tropes need to be positioned vis-a-vis each other. One of the strengths of their approach is that they provide concrete, applicable criteria to distinguish between related tropes. Their categorizations and subcategorizations are meticulously precise.[...] The framework provided in this monograph will also be beneficial in sorting out which tropes can be combined [...]. Moreover, it can help making progress in another challenging task, one that naturally flows from accepting that tropes reflect cognitive processes: charting how tropes can be expressed in other media than language. Other media (pictures, film, music), have structure, but not grammar, and this has serious consequences for how one can identify tropical patterns in them. In turn, cognitive linguists, whose perspective is necessarily limited by the fact that they are…well, linguists, may profit from the work that is beginning to be done by cognitivist scholars working on tropes in non-verbal and multimodal media.”