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The Scope of the Pictorial and the Verbal in Multimodal Cognitive Linguistic Accounts of Visual Signification in Modal Ensembles Comprising Static Planar Signs

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Szawerna M.

Academic Journal of Modern Philology

2021

issue 14

313–336

Since early 2000s, various modal ensembles (verbo-gestural utterances, feature films, animations, political cartoons, printed advertisements, television commercials, comics, picture books, computer games, pieces of music, corporate trademarks and logos, medieval textiles, etc.; cf. Forceville and Urios-Aparisi 2009; Pinar Sanz 2015) have been the subject of scholarly exploration in multimodal cognitive linguistics — a burgeoning research field situated at the intersection of multimodality studies and cognitive linguistics — with a view to explicating how general cognitive mechanisms shape meanings communicated across modalities and providing additional evidence for the psychological reality of various theoretical and descriptive notions put forward by cognitive linguists. Given the goals of multimodal cognitive linguistics, it is not surprising that research in this field has not only highlighted certain characteristics of the analyzed modal ensembles, but has also de-emphasized or altogether hidden others. In this article, an attempt is made to examine a number of contributions to the strand of multimodal cognitive linguistics that focuses on the cognitive underpinnings of various static planar ensembles (printed advertisements, cartoons, comics, corporate logos, etc.) with regard to what these contributions tacitly assume to be included in the scope of the pictorial and the verbal — two key concepts of multimodal cognitive linguistics that have never been explicitly characterized by researchers in this strand. This attempt is undertaken in order to demonstrate that in the examined contributions the two concepts are implicitly made to subsume representations that are qualitatively so different that there is little reason for bundling them together, which is in turn intended to alert researchers and readers alike to the problems caused by the imposition of a binary construal (‘either verbal or pictorial’) onto a continuum of qualitatively diverse static planar signs. This article further shows that an alternative characterization of this semiotic continuum — one that is free of the problems engendered by construing the continuum in binary terms — has for a long time existed in the field of comics scholarship. In conclusion, it is suggested that a more interdisciplinary approach may help multimodal cognitive linguists avoid unwarranted oversimplifications in the future.

Metaphorical Underpinnings of Panels in Comics

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Szawerna M.

Academic Journal of Modern Philology

2014

vol. 3

89-107

In the field of comics studies, which evolved from a mere topic area into a burgeoning field of inquiry at the turn of 1980s and 1990s, the dialogue about meaning in comics was initiated by practicing cartoonists, who proposed new lines of research and introduced serviceable terminology which remains in use even today. These early contributions may have provided a solid basis for the investigation of meaning in comics, but they were repeatedly criticized for their lack of an academic orientation prerequisite for serious-minded comics scholarship. With the onset of the new millennium, it was linguistic theory that came to be called upon with increasing frequency to provide the missing orientation. Recent observers point out that for over a decade linguistics in general, and cognitive linguistics in particular, has informed much of the most insightful comics research. This paper is an attempt to contribute to the intersection of cognitive linguistics and comics scholarship by demonstrating that a number of conceptual metaphors whose linguistic manifestations have been studied in considerable detail facilitate, either separately or jointly, the conceptualization of the main formal unit of comics: the so-called panel. It appears that depending on what individual panels are taken to refer to (events, states, periods of time, visual fields, portions of the world of the story), they are metaphorized in different ways (as objects, containers, windows onto the world of the story), in accordance with a central tenet of conceptual metaphor theory whereby metaphors highlight some aspects of the metaphorized concept and simultaneously hide others. On the one hand, this paper adds to the growing body of research demonstrating that metaphor is a conceptual mechanism which transcends language; on the other, it adds to the dialogue about how comics achieve meaning by discussing the metaphorical underpinnings of the panel, and by framing this discussion in terms of cognitive linguistics, a scholarly tradition with which comics studies have successfully intersected.

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2 Academic Journal of Modern Philology

2 Szawerna M.

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1 2014

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The Scope of the Pictorial and the Verbal in Multimodal Cognitive Linguistic Accounts of Visual Signification in Modal Ensembles Comprising Static Planar Signs

Metaphorical Underpinnings of Panels in Comics