Researching multimodal metaphor in commercials and film Charles Forceville Media Studies, Universiteit van Amsterdam, The Netherlands. http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/c.j.forceville/ The cognitive metaphor theory (CMT), associated with work by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Ray Gibbs, Zoltán Kövecses, Eve Sweetser, Mark Turner, Gilles Fauconnier and many others, considers metaphorizing as central to cognition. CMT is committed to the view that human beings are capable of mastering abstract concepts only by metaphorically coupling them with concrete, perceptible phenomena (e.g., the abstract concept discussion is systematically understood in terms of the physical concept war, as in “he attacked my argument”; a more entrenched metaphor is time is space, as in “all these traumatic events are behind us – we should now start looking ahead”). This view of metaphor as “embodied” – presupposing universal features – has more recently been complemented by an awareness that culturally specific factors also play a crucial role in the production and reception of metaphors (e.g., Kövecses 2005; for an overview, see Gibbs 2008). Until recently, the predominant focus of CMT was exclusively on verbal expressions of metaphor. However, in order to test claims about metaphor’s pervasive role in cognition, it is imperative to extend research to non-verbal and multimodal specimens (Forceville 1996, Johnson 2007, Müller 2008, Forceville & Urios-Aparisi, forthcoming). Fig. 1: Orang Utan is Mona Lisa (billboard for Amsterdam Zoo, 1980s) Fig. 2: Shoe is egg (poster in shoe shop, Leeds, 2006) While the investigation of verbal metaphor is now progressively more corpus-governed (e.g., Charteris-Black 2004, Deignan 2005, Caballero 2006), multimodal metaphor scholars are still in the stage of developing theory via detailed case studies. In this paper I will outline what research questions in this young branch of metaphor studies await scholarly answers, drawing on examples from the genres of commercials and fiction film. This requires adaptation and expansion of the model developed in Forceville (1996), which discussed static representations from print advertising (see figures 1 and 2) to moving images in various genres. Issues that will be addressed here include: what is the function of particular modes/modalities in the identification and interpretation of metaphors? Are modes equally distributed over a metaphor’s targets and sources? How do decisions to what genre a text belongs affect the processing of metaphors occurring in it? Systematically studying multimodal metaphor is a vast scholarly project that urgently requires further work from linguists knowledgeable about audiovisual mass-culture, and from media students knowledgeable about linguistics, and will benefit the study of cognition and metaphor as well as advance the theorization of multimodal discourse. References Caballero, Rosario (2006). Re-Viewing Space: Figurative Language in Architects’ Assessment of Built Space. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Charteris-Black, Jonathan (2004). Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Deignan, Alice (2005). Metaphor and Corpus Linguistics. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Forceville, Charles (1996). Pictorial Metaphor in Advertising. London & New York: Routledge. Forceville, Charles and Eduardo Urios-Aparisi, eds (forthcoming). Multimodal Metaphor. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Gibbs, Raymond W. Jr., ed. (2008). The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, Mark (2007). The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press. Kövecses, Zoltán (2005). Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Müller, Cornelia (2008). Metaphors Dead and Alive, Sleeping and Waking: A Dynamic View. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.