A multimodal perspective on metaphors and metonymies in art: A case study of the artwork Agora by Magdalena Abakanowicz
Dorota Dąbrowska
University of WarsawAbstract
The article is a semiotic study of the artistic installation Agora designed by a famous Polish sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz, based on the theoretical grounds of Cognitive Semantics. Metaphor and metonymy are conceptual processes whose communicative function is discussed in the paper, in particular, their role in deciphering possible meanings of the artwork. The paper also demonstrates how the multimodal analysis of the verbo-visual material can give rise to diverse interpretations of the figures.Keywords:
cognitive semantics, metaphor, metonymy, artReferences
Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang.
El Refaie, Elisabeth. 2009. “What Makes Us Laugh? Verbo-Visual Humour in Newspaper Cartoons”. In: E. Ventola and A.J. Moya Guijarro (eds.), The World Told and the World Shown, 75-89. New York: Palgrave McMillan.
Feng, D. and O’Halloran, K. L. 2013. “The visual representation of metaphor: A social semiotic approach.” Review of Cognitive Linguistics 11 (2): 320-335.
Forceville, Charles. 1996. Pictorial Metaphor in Advertising. London/New York: Routledge.
Forceville, Charles. 2008. “Metaphor in Pictures and Multimodal Representations”. In: R. W. Gibbs (eds), The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, 462-482. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Forceville, Charles and Eduardo Urios-Aparisi. 2009. “Introduction”. In: Ch. Forceville and E. Urios-Aparisi (eds.), 2009. Multimodal Metaphor, 3-17. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Grady, Joseph Edward 1997. Foundations of Meaning: Primary Metaphors and Primary Scenes. Ph.D. dissertation. University of California: Berkeley.
Górska, Elżbieta. 2014. “Why are multimodal metaphors interesting? The perspective of verbovisual and verbo-musical modalities”. In: M. Kuźniak, A. Libura and M. Szawerna (eds.), From Conceptual Metaphor Theory to Cognitive Ethnolinguistics. Patterns of Imagery in Language, 17-36. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang.
Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind. The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kövecses, Zoltán. 1990. Emotion Concepts. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Kövecses, Zoltán. 2000. Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kövecses, Zoltán. 2002. Metaphor. A Practical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kraska-Szlenk, Iwona. 2005. “Metaphor and metonymy in the semantics of body parts: A contrastive analysis”. In: E. Górska and G. Radden (eds.), Metonymy-Metaphor Collage, 157-175. Warsaw: Warsaw University Press.
Kraska-Szlenk, Iwona. 2014. “Extending Body-Part Terms in the Domain of Emotions”. In: M. Brenzinger and I. Kraska-Szlenk (eds.), The Body in Language. Comparative Studies of Linguistic Embodiment, 52-70. Leiden/Boston: Brill.
Kwiatkowska, Alina. 2013. Interfaces, Interspaces. Image. Language. Cognition. Piotrków Trybunalski: Naukowe Wydawnictwo Piotrkowskie.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.
Maalej, Zouheir A. 2014. “Body Parts We Live By in Language and Culture: The raas ‘head’ and yidd ‘hand’ in Tunisian Arabic”. In: M. Brenzinger and I. Kraska-Szlenk (eds.), The Body in Language. Comparative Studies of Linguistic Embodiment, 224-259. Leiden/Boston: Brill.
Mittelberg, Irene and Linda R. Waugh. 2009. “Metonymy first, metaphor second: A cognitive – semiotic approach to multimodal figures of thought in co-speech gesture”. In: Ch. Forceville and E. Urios-Aparisi (eds.), Multimodal Metaphor, 329-356. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Müller, Cornelia. 2008. Metaphors Dead and Alive, Sleeping and Waking. A Dynamic View. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Radden, Günter and Zoltán Kövecses. 1999. “Towards a Theory of Metonymy”. In: K.-U. Panther and G. Radden (eds.), Metonymy in Language and Thought, 17-59. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Rohdin, Mats. 2009. “Multimodal metaphor in classical film theory from the 1920s to the 1950s”. In: Ch. Forceville and E. Urios-Aparisi (eds.), Multimodal Metaphor, 403-428. Berlin. Mouton de Gruyter.
Urios-Aparisi, Eduardo. 2009. “Interaction of multimodal metaphor and metonymy in TV commercials: Four case studies”. In: Ch. Forceville and E. Urios-Aparisi (eds.), Multimodal Metaphor, 95-117. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Yu, Ning. 2009. “Nonverbal and multimodal manifestations of metaphors and metonymies: A case study”. In: Ch. Forceville and E, Urios-Aparisi (eds.), Multimodal Metaphor, 119-143. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Zbikowski, Lawrence M. 2009. “Music, language, and multimodal metaphor”. In: Ch. Forceville and E. Urios-Aparisi (eds.), Multimodal Metaphor, 359-381. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Cambridge International Dictionary of English. 1997. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/agora (accessed: 22.04.2017).
