The Visual Metonymy in Japanese Children’s Books Intended for Two Levels of Reader's Age: A Multimodal Approach (original) (raw)
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Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 2023
Multimodal communication is found in modern discourse types, including textbooks, influencing the attitude and motivation in message interpretation. The paper will explore instances of visual metonymy in English textbooks for young learners (grades 1-4) approved by the Ministry of Science and Education in the Republic of Croatia. Metonymy is qualitatively simpler than conceptual metaphor (Rundblad & Annaz, 2010), requires less cognitive effort to process and is, therefore, more salient in textbooks for children. Previous studies (Guijarro, 2015; Littlemore, 2009) indicated its important role in both these fields of authors' interest. The occurrences of visual metonymy in the approved textbooks will be collected, analysed and grouped according to the metonymic target (actions, emotions, occupations, etc.). The results will show which concepts appear most commonly as metonymic targets in the visual form in the textbooks and attempt to determine their appropriateness for the chronological, mental and cognitive age of children. Also, the functions of visual metonymies will be identified.
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DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), 2019
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This article systematizes the manifestations of metonymy in natural language. The principal metonymical patterns in English nouns are discovered to be: resultative, causative, instrumental, objective, locative and possessive. Synchronically, a statistical analysis of their frequency is carried out. Diachronically, the historical-semantic analysis is undertaken to ascertain the development of metonymical patterns in the cases of categorial and prototypal polysemy. In the section devoted to metonymy in imaginative speech the hierarchical taxonomy of metonymical tropes and figures is presented. In conclusion, there is an overview of metonymy in comparison with other means of semantic change and some ideas on conceptual metonymy.
Cognitive Linguistics Studies, 2020
Conceptual Metaphor Theory’s central idea that metaphor is a figure of thought rather than a figure of language has led to the examination of non-verbal and multimodal manifestations of metaphor. Over the past twenty years, the verbal trope of metonymy has similarly been theorized from a conceptual point of view, but the implications of this work for visual studies have only begun to be examined. Examining visual manifestations of metonymy will moreover also improve our understanding of visual metaphor, as often these latter depend on, and interact with, metonymies. In this paper we propose to explore the interaction of metaphor and metonymy in the visual/multimodal realm of print advertising, using Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez and Olga Díez’ (2002) typology, and building on Paula Peréz-Sobrino’s (2017) applications of this typology. Our twofold aim is (1) to see if, and if so, how, all patterns of this typology appear in ads; and (2) to investigate a number of Iranian and Dutch print advertisements in which metaphor and metonymy interact. Analyzing ads from two cultures will enable us to demonstrate how cultural background knowledge is essential for understanding metaphor-metonymy interactions.
Metonymy in visual and audiovisual discourse
In: Eija Ventola and Arsenio Jésus Moya Guijarro (eds), The World Told and the World Shown: Issues in Multisemiotics. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
In this chapter I propose to discuss pictorial and multimodal equivalents of what in Cognitive Linguistics (CL) is called ‘metonymy’. CL has long focused almost exclusively on metaphor, defined as ‘understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, p. 5) as the trope that sheds most light on how cognition works, since CL holds that human beings systematically understand abstract concepts metaphorically in terms of concrete phenomena. In the past decade, metonymy has gradually begun to attract sustained attention in CL scholarship as the trope that, on a par with metaphoricity, rules human cognition. The generally accepted difference between the two 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. But, as in metaphor research, the predominant focus in recent studies (Barcelona, 2000; Dirven and Pörings, 2002) is on linguistic manifestations of metonymic thinking alone. However, it is important that claims about human thinking are not exclusively made on the basis of verbal expressions. Building on work pertaining to pictorial metaphor (Forceville, 1988, 1996, 2005a, 2007a, 2007b; Forceville and Urios-Aparisi, forthcoming; Whittock, 1990; Carroll 1994, 1996), Teng and Sun (2002), for instance, present proposals for the conceptualisation of pictorial oxymoron and pictorial grouping (see also Teng, 2006; Kennedy, 1982). The analyses offered here will 2 both help evaluate CL claims about metonymy and provide insights into regularities of multimodal discourse. My goal is to identify certain phenomena occurring in discourses that are not (exclusively) verbal, and propose to analyse these as metonyms. I will do so by first outlining CL views on metonymy, and then discussing salient metonyms in two advertising campaigns and two feature films. As a general background, I will assume that a communicator always has a reason to use a metonym, and to use one metonym rather than another. This is commensurate with Sperber and Wilson’s (1995) claim that any act of communication is presumed, by its audience, to be optimised in terms of relevance; with Clark’s view of discourse as a ‘joint activity’, in which, crucially, ‘the knowledge, beliefs, and suppositions [the participants] believe they share about the activity’ accumulate incrementally (Clark, 1996, p. 38); with Tomasello’s insistence that it is the ‘joint attentional frame’ between speaker and listener ‘which sets the context for the reading of the specific communicative intentions behind a word or utterance’ (Tomasello, 2003, p. 89); and with Gibbs’ idea that ‘the recovery of communicative intentions is an essential part of the cognitive processes that operate when we understand human action of any sort’ (Gibbs, 1999, p. 4-5).
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