Understanding Abstract Concepts across Modes in Multimodal Discourse

A Cognitive Linguistic Approach

Elżbieta Górska

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367787745
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000703009
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume looks at spatialization of abstract concepts in verbo-pictorial aphorisms at work in the cartoons of a single artist. While extensive work has been done in studying spatialization of abstract concepts in grammar and lexicon within cognitive linguistics, this book is the first of its kind to provide a detailed account of such phenomena in multimodal discourse. The volume integrates a range of approaches from cognitive linguistics, including image schema theory, conceptual theory of metaphor, multimodal metaphor theory, the dynamic approach to metaphor, and a multimodal approach to metonymy, and applies this multi-faceted framework to a selection of cartoons from the work of Polish artist Janusz Kapusta. Taken together, these cartoons form the basis of two comprehensive case studies which explore the abstract concepts of "emotions" and "life," highlighting the ways in which cartoons can illustrate the important relationship between space, situated cognition, and language and in turn, a clear and systematic framework for establishing cohesive ties between the verbal and pictorial modes in multimodal cognitive linguistic research. The volume sheds new light on visual thinking and multimodal rendition of creative abstract thought.

1 Introduction

Against the background of research into image schemas (Johnson 1987), this chapter introduces the theoretical frame for the case studies in Chapters 2 and 3. The data sample of cartoons by Janusz Kapusta, a Polish artist, is described, and a preliminary is given to how the interaction of the verbal and pictorial modalities will be studied in the following chapters. The discussion focuses on the role of image-schematic metaphors in spatial construals of abstract concepts in Janusz Kapusta’s cartoons, which are treated here as a more specific genre of verbo-pictorial aphorisms. The method of analysis is exemplified with three verbo-pictorial aphorisms that provide a novel understanding of the concepts of errors, nightmares, unfulfilled dreams, and of significance of a human being. In contrast to the gestural medium, films and music, where the relevant elements of image-schematic source domains of a metaphor are never fully available at once, the verbo-pictorial aphorisms provide access to a conceptual image which can be inspected as a single gestalt. Crucially, it is the static composition of verbo-pictorial aphorisms as a genre that makes them a valuable source of data for investigating the question of how the pictorial and the verbal modality interact in understanding abstract ideas in multimodal discourse.

1.1 Developments in Image Schema Theory

1.1.1 The Notion of Image Schemas

In cognitive linguistics, the notion of “image schemas” was first extensively discussed by Mark Johnson (1987) in his book The Body in the Mind.¹ The title of the book directly addresses two inseparable aspects of such schemas: they emerge from preconceptual “bodily” experience, i.e. perceptual interactions and motor programs, and, at the same time, they are “in the mind”—i.e. they are patterns of thought that stay “directly” meaningful throughout our life, providing highly schematic structure to both our experience and to our concepts. To illustrate the emergence of image schemas, let us first consider the near-far schema.² Its direct bodily motivation derives from the infant’s primary experience of physical closeness with people, in which physical proximity is strongly correlated with affection and emotional “warmth”. In turn, perception of the world around us—flocks of birds flying, or dogs, in contrast to cats, emitting similar sounds, provides numerous examples of physical closeness and distance (along some dimension) being correlated with, respectively, similarity and difference. It is notable that in Johnson’s monograph (2007), the near-far schema is not mentioned, yet there a schema appears labelled as “toward-away from” (Johnson 2007, 21), which implicitly refers to ‘moving closer/moving away from’. It would seem, then, that this label names the dynamic aspect of the near-far schema which, as any other image schema, characterizes both states and processes. In other words, irrespective of the label, this preconceptual structure captures not only our knowledge about locations of things in terms of distance, but also about things getting closer or moving apart.

The dynamic aspect of the balance schemas is also highly conspicuous (Johnson 1987, 74–76). Aside from the experiential knowledge about the state of balance, it also grasps the preconceptual knowledge about the body losing balance and falling, or seeking balance and finding balance that every infant acquires as it learns to walk. Clearly, “balancing is an activity we learn with our bodies and not by grasping a set of rules or concepts” (Johnson 1987, 75). Moreover, being in a state of balance gains its direct meaning for us also through the closely related experience of bodily equilibrium, or loss of equilibrium, as when we feel that our hands are too hot or too cold.

In turn, when discussing the emergence of the force schema, Johnson (2007) observes:

Because of our ongoing bodily encounter with physical forces that push and pull us, we experience the image-schematic structures of [among others] compulsion, attraction, […] blockage of movement, [and the removal of restraint] […]. The bodily logic of such force schemas will give rise to specific inferences that we draw, based on the internal structure of the schemas. For instance, objects move at varying speeds, they move along trajectories, there is a rhythmic flow to their movement, they start and stop, etc. Based on these and other characteristics of moving objects, the internal structures of the image schemas for forced movement support and constrain the precise inferences we make about our experience. There are thus quite distinctive patterns and logics to these dimensions of our perception of moving objects, our kinaesthetic sense of our own motion, and our proprioceptive sense of the position and movement of our body parts.

(Johnson 2007, 137)

To exemplify the subtypes of force, let us consider the compulsion and the removal of restraint schemas. The compulsion schema emerges from our experience of various kinds of external force that cause us to move—be they natural forces such as wind, physical objects, or other people (Johnson 1987, 45). The internal structure of this schema is represented in Figure 1.1, where the solid arrow represents an actual force factor, and the broken arrow a potential force vector or trajectory:

In turn, the removal of restraint schema emerges from our everyday experience of actual barriers being removed (as when the door opens and we can enter a house) or potential barriers simply not being in our way (as when a child learning to walk is not stopped by a parent), and in effect a path is open and a force can be exerted freely. The internal structure of this schema is diagrammed in Figure 1.2, where the solid arrow and broken arrow represent, respectively, an actual and a potential force vector or trajectory, while the vertical rectangle represents the actual or potential barrier:

Likewise, the internal logic of the source-path-goal schema (a.k.a. path) emerges from our ubiquitous preconceptual experience of locomotion: we start to move at some specific point in space and, as we move, we traverse a series of contiguous locations that lead to our destination, or the endpoint of the path (see Johnson 1987, 113–117). To characterize the logic of this schema, Johnson resorts to the following simple example: “Consider a case in which you are moving along a linear path toward a destination, and at time T1 you are halfway to the destination. If you then travel farther along the path and reach time T2, you will be closer to your destination at T2 than you were at T1” (2007, 139). However “trivial” it may sound, he goes on to argue, “it is just such spatial and bodily logic that makes it possible for us to make sense of, and to act intelligently within, our ordinary experience” (Johnson 2007, 139). Note, further, that relative to the path schema we also derive inferences about motions without any clear goal. And, through our experience of rectilinear motion, we arrive at more specific inferences about the straight-line movement, curved motions, or other deviations from motion along a straight path (Cienki 1998b).

Figure 1.1The compulsion Schema

Source: Johnson (1987, 45); adapted from Evans and Green (2006, 188).

Figure 1.2The removal of restraint Schema

Source: Johnson (1987, 47); adapted from Evans and Green (2006, 189).

Over the years, the list of image schemas has been expanded. Johnson’s original “partial list” names 27 (1987, 126), while the list compiled from the available literature by Evans and Green (2006) includes 40 (see Table 1.1).³ Note that in Table 1.1 the schemas are arranged in terms of their experiential grounding; the near-far and the path schemas are included in, respectively, the “spatial” and the “locomotion” group, while balance and force constitute two distinct subgroups.

Experientially, image schemas commonly cluster together, forming gestalt structures (Cienki 1997). For example, the cluster of centre-periphery, near-far, scale, and force schemas forms one common experiential gestalt: “In our bodily experience, we are centres of force, sources of movement and action. While on one hand, each of us is subjected to many external forces on a daily basis (literally or metaphorically), the individual is also a starting point of vectors of force, which can be exerted outward from the body, and which typically decrease in intensity the further out they extend (hence their scalar nature)” (Cienki 1997, 8). The grouping of cycle, path, process, iteration, and force is another common experiential gestalt: “A cycle can be understood as a path that returns to its point of origin, representing a processwhich can be repeated (iteration) and continued by virtue of the force of momentum (Cienki 1997, 8). Such groupings are deeply engrained in our experientially derived knowledge, so that, as Cienki observes, “we are often not consciously aware of encountering them simultaneously” (p. 8). This, of course, makes the task of employing image schemas for analytical and explanatory purposes highly demanding. The difficulty of the task, however, should not prevent us from trying to decompose such experiential wholes with the due attention that this task deserves. If image schemas, as cognitive linguists extensively argue, provide structure and logic to our abstract thought (Johnson 1987, 2007; Lakoff and Johnson 1999), we have to address this task in order to understand the way we think.

Table 1.1A Partial List of Image Schemas

space	front-back, left-right, up-down (verticality), near-far, centre-periphery, contact, straight
containment	container, in-out, surface, full-empty, content
locomotion	source-path-goal, momentum
balance	equilibrium, axis balance, twin-balance, point-balance
force	compulsion, blockage, counterforce, diversion, removal of restraint, enablement, attraction, resistance
unity/multiplicity	collection, part-whole, merging, splitting, link(age), iteration, count-mass
identity	matching, superimposition
existence	bounded space, object, process, cycle, removal

Source: adapted from Evans and Green (2006, 190, Table 6.3)

1.1.2 Socio-Cultural Situatedness of Image Schemas

It might be instructive to refer, first, to Johnson’s (1987) original characterization of image schemas. When introducing this concept, he defined them as “patterns of embodied experience and preconceptual structures of our sensibility (i.e., our mode of perception, or orienting ourselves, and of interacting with other objects, events, or persons)”, but, at the same time, he noted that “[t]hese embodied patterns do not remain private or peculiar to the person who experiences them. Our community helps us interpret and codify many of our felt patterns. They become shared cultural modes of experience and help to determine the nature of our meaningful, coherent understanding of our ‘world’ ” (Johnson 1987, 14).

In line with this view, when image schemas were employed in cognitive descriptions of language, the main emphasis was put on their “embodied” and “preconceptual” character, and socio-cultural situatedness entered the discussion in the context of the question of how, within the “range of possible patterns of understanding and reasoning” that are established by image schemas, meaning that is embedded “within culture, language, institutions, and historical traditions” arises (Johnson 1987, 137).⁴

The first work that argued for an extended conception of embodiment of image schemas was, to my knowledge, Sinha and Jensen de López’s (2000) experimental study on the acqu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Typographical Conventions
• List of Examples, Figures, and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 A Multimodal Case Study of emotion Concepts
• 3 A Multimodal Case Study of life
• 4 Conclusion
• References
• Index