17 March – Marianna Bolognesi
Visual Metaphor
Dr. Marianna Bolognesi is a postdoc researcher at the Metaphor Lab. She recently started a Marie Curie project on the cognitive grounding of visual metaphor (Cogvim).
According to Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT, Lakoff & Johnson 1980), metaphors are matters of thought, and as such they are independent from the modality of expression. But while linguistic manifestations have been widely and extensively investigated, visual metaphors have received less attention from the scientific community of cognitive linguists and cognitive scientists.
During this presentation Marianna Bolognesi will talk about the functioning and variability of the visual modality of expression of metaphor, and the implications that this modality brings into the tenets of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and the embodied account of cognition. Then, she will outline the Marie Curie project on visual versus verbal metaphors that she just started. Her resesarch will be achieved through an interdisciplinary method that brings together psychological data elicited from participants, as well as large scale semi-automated analysis of words across a corpus of language and a corpus of annotated images.