Marianna Bolognesi presents Vismet at Cognitive Linguistics Symposium Zagreb
Marianna Bolognesi will give a presentation entitled “Vismet 1.0: an Online Annotated Corpus of Visual Metaphors” at the Cognitive Linguistics Symposium “Building Figurative Language Repositories: Methods, Risks, and Challenges and Round Table at Zagreb, Croatia.
Abstract
The visual modality of expression of metaphor is gaining popularity in tshe scientific and academic landscape, especially in the field of communication (among others), because many researchers come to acknowledge the increasing power that visual communication has in our current society.
However, the scientific contributions in this blooming field are still limited to case studies conducted on a small amount of images, often belonging to only one specific genre (typically advertising). Extensive and systematic analyses of this modality of expression are yet to be produced. One of the main reason for this gap is the lack of accessible resources, i.e. a corpus of visual metaphors that can be compared and analyzed across genres and types.
We hereby introduce the first release of VisMet, an online resource of annotated images (a corpus) that can be used by students and researchers from different academic fields interested in visual rhetoric. This corpus includes images in which the viewer is stimulated to project (or map) at least one feature belonging or evoked by the source domain onto the target domain. This way, the viewer is to construe one (or more) non-reversible A-IS-B identity relation(s), where at least one of the two domains is expressed or cued by visual means that show perceptual incongruities (following Šorm and Steen 2013; Šorm and Steen in preparation). The current version contains around 350 images (advertising, artworks, and political cartoons).
Images have been systematically annotated according to a taxonomy that is based on the three dimensions of meaning (Steen 2011): conceptualization, expression, and communication. As a matter of fact, we believe that an encompassing tripartite model of metaphor is needed to answer to crucial questions pertaining visual metaphor research, such as: at which level of abstraction shall I consider expressing the metaphor? Shall I stick to what is depicted?
The tripartite model of meaning, here applied to visual metaphors, suggests a solution to the problem posed by other models, which remain “stuck” at the level of the sign, defining the denotative meaning of the metaphor (e.g. Forceville 1996). Moreover, as other scholars also did, we have observed that metaphor is often combined with metonymy in visual realizations, in order to cue abstract concepts (see also Koller 2009; Forceville 2009), which are often crucial for understanding what we believe is the target domain of the metaphor expressed on a conceptual dimension. This allows us to address the contemporary cognitivist approach to metaphor as a figure of thought.