Tonal iconicity and narrative transformation

Building on recent research, this paper argues that left-right bilaterality and symmetrical reversibility play only a limited role in the embodied grounding of chiasmus and its cognitive and cultural affordances. Expanding such accounts to feature the bodily semiotics of vertical and transverse modeling is necessary. To better demonstrate this point and elaborate on its implications, the paper presents two narrative case studies: Sylvia Plath’s short story ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams’ and Episode 1 of the podcast Dolly Parton’s America, entitled ‘Sad Ass Songs’. Both narratives evoke explicitly embodied blends involving analogous upper-lower body part systems; both integrate these blends with chiastic dynamics that are explicit in the syntax and implicit in the discourse pragmatics of each text; and both texts use these chiastic macro-blends to frame transformations that function as each narrative’s interpretive locus. I explicate these sense-making strategies through a semiotic discourse analysis, applying insights from Peircean semiotics and cognitive linguistics to show how chiastic meaning can be grounded in the coalescence of oppositional but complementary layers of tonal iconicity (felt resemblances) referenced by diagrammatic types and tokens, all of which are implicit in, and intrinsic to, the lived experience of habitual upright posture.