Pictorial and Multimodal Metaphor

Forceville (1996) distinguished three types of pictorial metaphor which he nowadays labels “contextual metaphor,” “hybrid metaphor,” and “simile,” depending on whether it is the visual context that metaphorizes an object (contextual metaphor), whether target and source are physically conflated (hybrid metaphor) or whether they are juxtaposed (simile) –  see figures 1-3. The fourth type introduced in Forceville (1996), “verbo-pictorial metaphor” (see figure 4), was later seen as being, in fact, a subtype of multimodal metaphor. Moreover, another type was introduced for three-dimensional metaphorical objects (see Van Rompay 2005, Cila 2013). This type has been labelled both “integrated metaphor” (by Forceville) and “product metaphor” (by Cila, see figure 5).

Whereas pictorial metaphors – which in pure form are specimens of the monomodal variety – now receive a fair amount of scholarly attention, research on multimodal metaphor is still in its infancy. In principle, any combination of modes can give rise to multimodal metaphor, but in practice, only the following have been regularly examined: visuals + written language; visuals + sound/music; spoken language + gestures (see Forceville and Urios-Aparisi 2009 for leads).

An important spin-off of Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) is Fauconnier and Turner’s “Blending Theory” (also called: “Conceptual Integration Theory”; see Fauconnier and Turner 2002). The basic idea is that there are many hybrids that are (1) not metaphorical; and (2) have more than just two “input spaces” (while metaphors always have two: target and source). This theory is now also branching out into the pictorial and multimodal realm (see Forceville 2013 for an example).

Here are some of the areas in the subdiscipline of pictorial and multimodal metaphors that deserve to be investigated more systematically. Which permutations of modes allow for multimodal metaphors? Which role plays (sub)cultural knowledge & ideology in their construal and interpretation? How do multimodal metaphors differ per genre (advertising, art, manual ...) and medium (static picture, film, comics, facebook, instagram ...)? Which other tropes (metonymy, symbol, hyperbole, irony, oxymoron ...) do have visual and multimodal counterparts, and how can they be distinguished from one another? What are the differences between “creative metaphor” (Black 1979) and “structural metaphor” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980)? For more discussion of all of these issues, and to other sources, please see Forceville (in prep.) and my online Course on Pictorial and Multimodal Metaphor.