Charles Forceville

Non-verbal and multimodal metaphor in a cognitivist framework: agendas for research

Cognitive metaphor theory (CMT) has over the past 25 years amply argued that we do not only write and speak but, more importantly, actually think in metaphors. If this tenet of CMT is correct, metaphor should necessarily manifest itself not just in language but also in other modes of communication, such as pictures, music, sounds, and gestures. However, non-verbal and multimodal metaphor have been far less extensively studied than their verbal sisters. The present article provides discussion of work done in this area, focusing on a number of issues that require further research. Some are specific for non-verbal and multimodal metaphor, others invite reconsideration in the realm of linguistic metaphor. These issues include the proposal to distinguish between monomodal and multimodal metaphor; reflections on the distinction between structural and creative metaphor; the question of how verbalizations of non-verbal or conceptual metaphors may affect their possible interpretation; thoughts as to how similarity is created between target and source once the realm of purely verbal discourse is left; and suggestions about the importance of genre for the construal and interpretation of metaphor;

Metaphors in editorial cartoons representing the global financial crisis

Lakoff and Johnson claim that metaphors play a crucial role in systematically structuring concepts, not just language. Probing the validity of this far-reaching claim requires an investigation of multimodal discourse. In this article, the authors analyse the 25 metaphors that structure a sample of 30 political cartoons pertaining to the global financial crisis that hit the world in 2008, and find that certain source domains recur systematically. They examine the role of visual and verbal modalities and argue that metaphors are manifestations of underlying conceptual ones. In the service of future research pertaining to multimodal metaphor and multimodal discourse, the authors also reflect on the methodological problems they encountered, and on the decisions they took to solve them.

Educating the eye? Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (1996)

This review article of Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (KvL) Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (1996) begins by giving a summary of its main issues, and highlights its innovative and bold proposals. In the following sections, some weaknesses and controversial aspects of the book are discussed. Both are seen as following from the semiotic and ideological approach adopted by the authors. Specifically, these affect the proposals for the classification and interpretation of images, and the degree to which the concepts delineated are generalizable. In the later sections, tentative suggestions are made as to how KvL’s approach is relevant to the currently emerging ‘cognitivist’ paradigm.

The source-path-goal schema in the autobiographical journey documentary: McElwee, Van der Keuken, Cole.

The source–path–goal schema is one of the most fundamental schemas governing human conceptualizing with regard to sense‐making (Johnson 1993; Turner 1996). Literally structuring the concept of the journey (involving a starting point, trajectory and destination), by extension it shapes our understanding of what constitutes a purposeful life (initial problems or ambition, actions, solution or achievement) and story (beginning, middle, end). Hitherto, discussions of this schema have almost exclusively focused on its verbal manifestations. This paper analyses three autobiographical documentaries in which the filmmaker undertakes a journey: Ross McElwees Shermans March (1986), Johan van der Keukens De Grote Vakantie [The Long Holiday] (2001) and Frank Coles Life Without Death (1999). The papers aim is double‐edged: to demonstrate the necessity of studying the source–path–goal schema in multimodal, rather than just in purely verbal manifestations; and to show how the source–path–goal schema both enriches and constrains possible interpretations of the three documentaries under consideration. It is moreover claimed that, in the last resort, journey and quest levels are inevitably made subservient to the story level.

The Metaphor "COLIN IS A CHILD" in Ian McEwan's, Harold Pinter's, and Paul Schrader's The Comfort of Strangers

In the cognitivist paradigm, metaphors conceptual nature is investigated almost exclusively in its verbal manifestations. Research on nonverbal expressions of conceptual metaphors is still surprisingly scarce. Although some pioneering work has been done in the area of pictorial metaphor, the work has hitherto focused on specific instances of isolated metaphors. For better insight into the nature of conceptual metaphors, it is necessary to examine if they can be rendered pictorially and mixed-medially, and if so, what forms they could take. In this case study, a structural metaphor from Ian McEwans novel The Comfort of Strangers is analyzed and compared to its counterpart in the film that Paul Schrader based on the book. The article ends with suggestions for generalizations across different media, including a distinction between explicitly and implicitly signaled metaphors.

Metonymy in Visual and Audiovisual Discourse

This chapter discusses pictorial and multimodal equivalents of what in cognitive linguistics (CL) is called ‘metonymy’. CL has long focused almost exclusively on metaphor, which is defined as ‘understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another’ (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, p. 5). According to CL, metaphor is central to cognition, since human beings are claimed systematically to understand abstract concepts in terms of concrete phenomena. However, in the past decade, metonymy has gradually begun to attract sustained attention as no less crucial in ruling human cognition. The generally accepted difference between metaphor and metonymy is that the two things combined in metaphor belong to different conceptual domains (e.g. ‘love is a battlefield’), while those in metonymy belong to the same conceptual domain (e.g. ‘count noses’). In short, in metaphor we get A-as-B; in metonymy B-for-A.

Relevance Theory as model for analysing visual and multimodal communication

Elaborating on my earlier work (Forceville 1996: chapter 5, 2005, 2009; see also Yus 2008), I will here sketch how discussions of visual and multimodal discourse can be embedded in a more general theory of communication and cognition: Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory/RT (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995; Wilson and Sperber 2004, 2012). The focus of attention will be the visual mode, sometimes accompanied by the written verbal mode, but the idea is that the reasoning developed here is generalizable to other (combinations of) modes. Such a project should benefit both multimodality theory, which urgently needs more rigorous analytic models than have hitherto been proposed for it, and RT, which while claiming to hold for all forms of communication has been mainly applied to its spoken verbal varieties.

Creativity and the agile mind : a multi-disciplinary study of a multi-faceted phenomenon

Creativity is a highly-prized quality in any modern endeavor, whether artistic, scientific or professional. Though a much-studied subject, and the topic of a great many case-studies, the field of creativity research is still very much an open one. Creativity remains a field where absolute definitions hold very little water, and where true insight can only emerge when we properly appreciate - from a nuanced, multi-disciplinary perspective - the crucial distinction between the producers perspective and the consumers perspective. Theories that afford us a critical appreciation of a creative work do not similarly afford a explanatory insight into the origins and development of the work. As researchers, we must approach creativity both as producers - to consider the vast search-spaces that a producer encounters, and to appreciate the need for heuristic strategies for negotiating this space - and as consumers, to appreciate the levels of shared knowledge (foreground and background) that is exploited by the producer to achieve a knowingly creative effect in the mind of the consumer. This volume thus brings together both producers and consumers in a cross-disciplinary exploration of this complex, many-faceted phenomenon.

Visual representation of emotion in manga: 'loss of control' is 'loss of hands' in Azumanga Daioh volume 4

Comics and manga have many ways to convey the expression of emotion, ranging from exaggerated facial expressions and hand/arm positions to the squiggles around body parts that Kennedy (1982) calls ‘pictorial runes’. According to Ekman at least some emotions — happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, anger, disgust — are universal, but this is not necessarily the case for their expression in comics and manga. While many of the iconic markers and pictorial runes that Forceville (2005) charted in an Asterix album to indicate that a character is angry occur also in Japanese manga, Shinohara and Matsunaka also found markers and runes that appear to be typical for manga. In this article we examine an unusual signal conveying that a character is emotionally affected in Volume 4 of Kiyohiko Azuma’s Azumanga Daioh: the ‘loss of hands’. Our findings (1) show how non-facial information helps express emotion in manga; (2) demonstrate how hand loss contributes to the characterization of Azuma’s heroines; (3) support the theorization of emotion in Conceptual Metaphor Theory.

The conspiracy in The comfort of strangers - narration in the novel and the film

Since stories increasingly take on pictorial and mixed-medial forms, narratology needs to investigate to what extent narrative devices exceed the boundaries of a specific medium. One way to examine this issue is to focus on film adaptations of narratologically complex novels or stories. This article presents a detailed comparison of the narration in McEwan’s (1982) [1981] The Comfort of Strangers and Schrader’s (1990) film based on a scenario by Harold Pinter. It is shown how the novel creates deliberate confusion (via free indirect speech and thought) about the agency responsible for the conveyance of crucial information, and how the film finds non-verbal means to achieve the same effect.