Jodi L. Sandford

Mario Brdar

English

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                 20.2 (2019): 191-197 191       Jodi L. Sandford1 Mario Brdar2 1University of Perugia 2University of Osijek     Introduction to the special section  on figurative multimodality  This special section of Jezikoslovlje is the fortunate result of papers on multimo-dality (crossmodality) and embodiment presented at the Third International Sym-posium on Figurative Thought and Language (FTL3) on April 26–28, 2017 at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Osijek, Croatia. The objective of the three-day symposium was to further a forum that discusses the links between figurative thought and language. Two previous events had been held in Thessaloniki - Greece (2014) and Pavia - Italy (2015), one has since been held in Braga - Portugal (2018), and one other is currently planned in Sofia - Bulgaria (2020).   The call for papers clearly explains how, at the time of its inception, Cognitive Linguistics (CL) was seen as being principally about conceptual metaphors, and additionally about metonymies and image schemas. However, the rapid evolution and diversification of CL revealed topics and methodologies that emerged through the widespread investigations. Gradually, conceptual metaphors and metonymies became less central, although years of multidisciplinary research on how conceptu-al metaphors and metonymies interact, on the neural base for these embodied cog-nitive mechanisms, and how they may be understood to motivate grammatical structures, have brought the construal operations to core research. Contributions have emerged from various theoretical and applied perspectives, including specifi-cally cognitive linguistics and the relation with cognitive science, neurosciences, and the philosophy of the mind. Furthering this line of study has called for analyses of methodologies, with the necessary experimental protocols involved in cross-    192Jodi L. Sandford – Mario Brdar: Introduction to the special section on figurative multimodality linguistic comparisons, both synchronic and diachronic analyses, corpus studies of language use, and in translation practices. To use the words employed in the con-ference: topics of research have included the impact of figuration on levels of lin-guistic analysis (morphology, lexis, semantics, pragmatics), on areas of grammar, on various types of discourse (e.g., art, music, economics, law, medicine, philoso-phy, politics, psychology, and psychotherapy), as well as figurative multimodality and the relationship between language and emotions, language and humour, irony, sarcasm, euphemism, etc.   Multimodality in CL may be defined as the utilization of more than one percep-tual modality in the processing of a given event. Initially it has been used in the theory of communication and social sciences to indicate types of communication such as textual, aural, linguistics, spatial, and visual. Our society has developed dif-ferent kinds of media, thus the concept of multimedia, and multimodality has re-ceived ever more importance in the analysis of input interpretation. As cognitive linguists we are interested in language seen as conceptualization and in how knowledge of language emerges from language use, with assuming that experience is fundamentally and unavoidably embodied. As emphasized in these chapters, em-bodiment is one of the major tenets of cognitive linguistic description at assorted stages of analysis. We receive the stimulus of the world around us through the bod-ily sensations, we perceive these, process them and conceptualize. It is our aim to investigate how the various manners of input influence our interpretation of lan-guage and how we manage to make sense of the constant variation of messages, looking at both the similarity of processing across languages and cultures and the cultural specificities. This is further pertinent in supporting research that has been carried out on the conceptualization process, entrenchment on the individual level, and convention at the community level. Hence, these five papers focus on embod-iment and the processing: 1) of image schemas and music, 2) of vision and taste, 3) of images and texts, 4) of vision and the role of opposites and similarities, and 5) of light in pictorial realization. The approaches include historic semantics, diachronic and synchronic analyses, cross lingual and cross modal lines through corpus anal-yses and an associative experiment. The first article entitled “The embodied and the cultural in the conceptualization of pitch space in Croatian” by Sanja Kiš Žuvela (University of Zagreb Music Academy, Croatia) and Ana Ostroški Anić (Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics, Croatia) proposes an analysis of music lexicon in Croatian, showing how it is conceptualized through embodied experience and image schemas. The analysis supports the key assumption that embodiment theory is based on meta-phorical patterns of mental representation, which connect pitch changes and                  20.2 (2019): 191-197 193musical motion to our experience of space, directionality, size, intensity, and scale. The authors find that a majority of conceptual metaphors model musical pitch on human perception, images, and experience structured through the schema of VER-TICALITY. Furthermore, they find that thickness and size emerge in Croatian musi-cal terminology expressing a horizontal relation. The image schemas of VERTICALI-TY and SIZE are analyzed within the conceptual metaphors PITCH RELATIONS ARE RELATIONS IN VERTICAL SPACE and PITCH RELATIONS ARE RELATIONS IN SIZE, which encompasses the metaphor PITCH RELATIONS ARE RELATIONS IN SPACE. The analysis concentrates on music as motion and the spatial conceptualization of musical pitch. The mapping is also discussed in the naming of human voice types, scale degrees, manual pitch representation, or in the representation of tonal relations.  The authors discuss how there are different sources of pitch height conceptual-ization, yet the majority are based on GREATER IS HIGHER, and how empirical re-search reveals the association between pitch and height. Nonetheless, they observe a fundamental “exception to the verticality principle is the term interval (‘the pitch relation between two tones’), which is in itself a linguistic metaphor exploiting a horizontal space “between two walls”. Other pitch relations are revealed in the metaphors TONALITY IS HOME and TIME RELATIONS ARE RELATIONS IN HORIZONTAL SPACE, which are traceable in English and Croatian musical terminologies to two major paths of linguistic borrowing: the Romanic tradition that connects the classi-cal Greek and Latin, vulgar mediaeval Latin, Old French and English, and the Germanic tradition that connects the classical languages, vulgar mediaeval Latin and German to Croatian. Žuvela and Anić also observe the PATH schema in the conceptualization of musical pitch, as shown in the conceptual mappings of the metaphor PITCH CONTOUR IS MOTION IN PHYSICAL SPACE, which gives evidence of the existence of a system of metaphors or what they call “the musical event struc-ture metaphor”. Concluding, they discuss how, though both “vertical and horizontal relations are mapped onto the pitch space”, the VERTICALITY schema in the concep-tual metaphor PITCH RELATIONS ARE RELATIONS IN VERTICAL SPACE emerges in the majority of the lexicon they analyzed, which critically illustrates how the concep-tualization of musical pitch space is prominently embodied.  The second article “Taste and sight: A corpus analysis of English adjective-noun constructions”, by Jodi L. Sandford (University of Perugia, Italy) focuses on the metaphoric relation between the domains of SIGHT/COLOR and TASTE. In this chap-ter the centrality of embodiment in the CL enterprise emerges as well. The ground-ing of language in body experience is considered in relation to how we use meta-phoric and metonymic cross-modal conceptualization in language. Sandford dis-cusses how inquiry has been carried out on the single sense domains of touch, taste,     194Jodi L. Sandford – Mario Brdar: Introduction to the special section on figurative multimodality smell, hearing, and sight, and also on cross-modality or synesthetic phenomena. A hierarchy presented in research on the topic seems to respect linguistic transfer from the lower (touch, taste, smell) to the higher senses (hearing and sight), despite some variation that has been noted. The study at hand presents an analysis of cross-modal linguistic mappings that exist between the senses of taste and sight. The aim is to verify what collocations occur between the two domains, whether they respect the hierarchy, and what type of relation lies between their frequency and entrench-ment.  A corpus analysis of the construction of the adjective–noun type follow indica-tions of existing literature: in this case it is the TASTE adjective source domain that is understood as a modifying SIGHT target domain, which is found in the form of a noun. It concentrates on cross-modal pairs found in a corpus-based analysis, e.g. delicious colors. The data retrieved from different corpora allowed for an analysis of current usage and the definition of the cross-modal construction. Constructions, mentioned only in this article, are understood in CL as a unit of language whose form typically concerns a particular pattern, where the meaning relates to a mental representation of the lexical concept that is conventionally associated with the form. Constructions are seen as regarding a word, a part of a word, or a string of words. The experimental methodology here, in keeping with the usage-based ap-proach of CL, considers frequency and relevance in the given taste sight/color con-struction, i.e., [BASIC TASTE adjective + noun] and the principle collocates; a specific corpus search [TASTE*][SIGHT*] considers then the divergence or con-vergence with the hierarchy hypotheses. Furthermore, the Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus of English are queried stressing specifically TASTE as the source domain, which it serves a majority of the time. Fundamentally, the synaes-thetic cross-modality transfer from taste to sight does occur though not as regularly as the opposite direction. This article offers a conceptual explanation of the con-strained grammatical order of adjectives before nouns in English for this construc-tion in synaesthetic transfer. Sandford suggests that taste-words are used to de-scribe sight-words, breaking the hypothetical hierarchy – less frequent ranking to the most frequent –, because there is a need to use varied lexemes for the less dif-ferentiated domain. The article by Ilhana Škrgić (an independent researcher), entitled “Figurative representation of death in the Italian comic book Dylan Dog,” discusses the specif-ic figure called the Grim Reaper as it appears in the Italian comics series. Faucon-nier and Turner extensively discussed the complexity of the Grim Reaper, describ-ing it in terms of Blending Theory and Conceptual Integration Theory. The Grim Reaper serves as an illustration of the complex integration of several mental spaces,                  20.2 (2019): 191-197 195including the spaces of an individual human being dying, and that of harvest, which through a generic space then creatively develops a blended space. Škrgić explains how “the process of conceptual integration is a basic mental operation that allows us to blend two or more already present mental spaces into a third one, a novel mental space which is not simply a composition or a simple ‘sum of its parts,’ but possesses an emergent structure of its own” as presented by Fauconnier and Turner. The process involves metaphoric and metonymic interactions of non-counterpart elements. The Grim Reaper is a well-known visual portrayal and personification of death in the collective consciousness of Western culture.  The author argues that comics, or graphic novels, lend themselves to analysis due to their multimodal nature, with conceptual metaphors and metonymies as a key feature of the medium. Moreover, she motivates the corpus chosen from a col-lection of 300 editions of Dylan Dog, published in Croatia from 1994 to 2018 and describes the importance of the publication through the years. The chapter utilizes four specific episodes/instances of the representation of Death in Dylan Dog, to de-termine the classic and modern elements of visual depictions of the Grim Reaper, following the blend structure with the input spaces, a generic space, and the blend-ed space. The author points out how through the visual dimension the artists crea-tively vary this classical trope: the Grim Reaper has both the traditional form, pre-sented in the episode A Chess Game with Death, and modern and creative variants of this form, in the episodes On the Other Side of the Mirror, Dance Macabre, and Paper Dungeon. The analysis focuses on how the variants present a conclusion of a transforming identity of Death between three input spaces, thereby establishing a novel compound of “monstrous appearance and proportions.” She considers this re-search as a stepping stone in analysis from a multimodal perspective of conceptual composition in free linguistic codes such as the graphic novel. In the article entitled “Light and dark: oppositional metaphor as the interaction of cognitive mechanisms” Svitlana Martinek (Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Ukraine) illustrates research conducted to verify the universality (or the de-gree of universality) of the binary opposition LIGHT–DARK within a given time period. Starting from the assumption that binary oppositions are not to be seen as “stable and unchangeable structures presented within human consciousness” but “as the external manifestation of specific cognitive mechanisms,” the chapter re-counts an empirical investigation of the binary opposition LIGHT–DARK based on the method of “associative experiment” (AE). Through evaluation of participant re-sponses, binary oppositions are revealed with a complex background of metaphori-cal interchange between the domains of the system. The main focus of this study is on how the “cognitive mechanisms of contradistinction” interact with conceptual     196Jodi L. Sandford – Mario Brdar: Introduction to the special section on figurative multimodality metaphor to help certain patterns emerge. Martinek explains how the concept of opposition has been a topic of investigation through the centuries; quoting Courte-nay, Saussure, and Lévi-Strauss as fundamental in the discussion of binary opposi-tions; and Derrida is mentioned as critical of it when applied as a method.  Here the two questions posed are: 1) what is the relation between the opposition LIGHT–DARK with other oppositions in the minds of representatives of certain linguacultures; 2) what is the interaction of cognitive mechanisms of contradistinc-tion and conceptual metaphors that establishes the basis for the complex opposi-tional metaphorical system. Clearly recognizing Talmy’s concept of introspection as the basis of any human conscious or unconscious response to language use, the author stresses the need for corpus-based and empirical enquiry such as the method employed in this study. The experiment is conducted by showing or saying a word (stimulus) to respondents, and then asking them to write or say what other word (response) comes first to their minds after receiving the stimulus. The time elapsed between the representing of the stimulus word and occurrence of the responsive word is restricted. Furthermore, Martinek states that though it is impossible to pro-vide the exhaustive classification of associative responses, they do expose frag-ments of complex conceptual structure with its specific features, associated emo-tions, and speakers’ evaluations which can be analyzed to uncover the underlying conceptual structures. The results the author reached via AE illustrates the paired oppositions that associated in the minds of the speakers, and how they are relevant for contemporary language usage of the participants. They are emblematic of the processes occurring in languages, which lead to a change in links between different oppositions that may decrease in their frequency or salience or even disappear. The AE participant results confirm Wierzbicka’s perspective that there is an intimate connection of the opposition LIGHT–DARK with the opposition DAY–NIGHT. In addition, the AE outcomes reveal the salience of the connection between light and day and the prototype source of light, i.e. the sun. In sum, we can say that biologi-cal evolutionary biases or constraints emerge on which our cultural variations are then founded. They can motivate language but cannot dictate how language is used. This collection of articles in rounded off by a discussion of “Light as a visual source domain for the divine in the 17th century painting” by Jana Čulig (University of Zagreb). It attempts to explain the motivation behind the creation of religious visual art in which light plays the role of the signifier of divine presence. An intedisciplinary combination of scientific perspectives that the author employs makes it possible to approach the concept of light from a wider perspective, leading to a deeper understanding of the concept, its use in human communication, and its significance for the structuring of the knowledge of the world by an individual, but                  20.2 (2019): 191-197 197also by the wider socio-cultural collective to which they belong. The author claims that representations of light in paintings from a particular socio-cultural period and context are generally based on metaphorization. The empirical basis for the analy-sis consists of four 17th century religious paintings of the Western artistic tradition, specifically from the Baroque period. The analysis of these paintings shows that sight, knowledge, cognition, understanding, and the divine are intertwined in the conceptual domain of light that can be communicated through non-linguistic sys-tems of signs. The understanding of the underlying meanings behind pictorial rep-resentation seems to stem from the cognitive mechanisms of conceptualization and metaphorization, specifically, from the basic conceptual metaphors KNOWING IS SEEING and MIND AS BODY. To conclude, this collection of articles discusses how manifestation of the uni-versal cognitive mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy are exemplified through gestalt operations of comparison, and similarity, of figure and ground alignment, and image schemas. The conceptualization of music and pitch space, of sight/color and taste constructions, of multimodal blends in graphic novels, of associations of visual words in binary oppositions, and of light representation in painting depends on aspects of our environment, revealed through prototypes that range between human embodied and specific cultural referents.  

Introduction to the special section on figurative multimodality

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