Multimodal metaphor: Word-image interactions
Multimodal metaphor: Word-image interactions

Summary/Abstract: Developed for almost forty years now, the concept of metaphor, which has its dir-ect origin in George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s 1980 book “Metaphors We LiveBy”, has come up against another interesting challenge in recent years. After thetheory was criticised by scholars who proposed to include contextual informationin the description of metaphors and mechanisms of metaphor use in discourse(cf. Musolff 2006; Zinken 2007; Zinken et al. 2008; Nerlich/Jaspal 2012; Kövecses2017a, 2017b), after Lakoff himself turned to computational theories of the mindand proposed to replace the conceptual theory of metaphor with the neural theoryof metaphor (Lakoff 2008), serious doubts concerning the nature of metaphor aswell as adequate analytical tools emerged in the context of research into the so-called multimodal communication1. First of all, analyses of human communica-tion using images and gestures drew attention to the fact that for many years re-search on conceptual metaphor had focused on verbal manifestations of mappingsbetween conceptual domains, mentioning in passing the fi gurative nature of otherhuman actions and creations (cf. for example Lakoff 1993)

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