The pictorial and multimodal metaphor

Present by

Johanna Maribel Pedroza Pérez

Corporación Unificada Nacional de Educación Superior “CUN”

Grade II Option – Group: 20163

Bogotá D.C., 2018

 The pictorial and multimodal metaphor

The metaphor is a mode of expression that is used for the purpose of transmitting a message

in which two parts are used: target and source. The source is what about the target is said. For

example, the name of a song composed by the author Pat Benatar and called "Love is a

battlefield" where "love" is the target and "battlefield" is the source. The word "love" can carry a

number of connotations because it integrates a series of concepts that resemble each other as the

words "lovers", "roses", "marriage", etc. The source "battlefield" also integrates a series of

related concepts such as "soldiers", "victories", "war” and so on.

Authors like Richards and Black wanted to explain through their own models about the theory

of the interaction of metaphor and its uses. The two terms that are part of the metaphor refer to

the main target and the domain of origin, which are not directly related to each other, but they

may have similarity. For example, as well as on the battlefield, soldiers fight against the enemy

to kill or injure him causing victims, it can also refer to a person fighting with his lover with the

intention of hurting him, causing unhappiness. Therefore, there is a structural relationship

between a series of elements in the source domain and corresponding elements in the main

target.

In the last two decades of the 20th century, developments have arisen in the theory of

metaphor, whose basic principle indicates that human beings think and explain their reality in a

metaphorical sense (Lakoff & Jhonson, 1986). Metaphors can be interesting, insightful and

persuasive, whose context can provide us with details about characteristics that are assigned to
the source. However, it depends on the literary genre in which a metaphor is interpreted, since a

metaphor in a poem is not the same as a metaphor in a news article.

With the presence of information and communication technologies, the metaphor cannot be

only expressed in the use of language, but through the most diverse semiotic modes such as

visual, sound, olfactory, gustative and tactile, each of which allows expressing, independently or

imbricated with other sign systems, the meanings.

The human being appropriates, categorizes, understands and explains the phenomena of

reality that can be perceived more directly. It is through the perception and historical

accumulation of own or third-party experiences that the most abstract concepts are constructed

using metaphors. This has made it possible to conceptualize and categorize reality, to understand

complex and abstract areas of experience in terms of other areas, thus having simpler

conceptualizations and categorizations that come from concrete experience. As explained by

Lakoff (1987), the metaphor comes from the human capacity to build inferences about

phenomena of social and natural reality, in order to understand and explain them.

Then, the metaphor is a cognitive structure and metaphorical expressions allow to recognize

ways of thinking and to guide the individual and collective action. The metaphor gives meaning

to the experience and produces a way of knowing and interpreting the new reality. Metaphorical

expressions constitute a resource, which helps to modify the ways in which reality is

conceptualized in a specific historical moment and affects the ways of perceiving the world and
its way of acting in relation to reality. This explains, for example, that nowadays global

communication and the Internet are supported by metaphors.

Meanwhile, multimodal metaphors are expressions that are constructed from the presence of

one or more modes in the domain of origin, and that in the main target are represented in sign

ways to produce the meaning. Thus, oral or written language, images, music, color or textures

create representations in different domains and can be related to produce a multimodal metaphor.

In a current context, we can see how a television commercial can be considered a metaphor in

which images, verbal sounds, music, environmental noises, color, shapes and textures are

integrated and contribute to the production of a multimodal metaphor.