METAPHOR AND MULTIMODALITY IN MEANING-MAKING

Abstract

When talking with people face to face, we usually complement verbal language with gestures, facial expressions and sometimes images and sounds present in the speech scene, which constitutes multimodality. When we write to absent people, we can recover multimodal resources employing what Greeks called “didaskalía”. We, human beings, are the only creatures in the planet able to refer in absence. We can talk about a horse – which lives in a farm – in our living room. In doing so we trigger pre-existing multimodal senses from our addressee’s long-term memory, related to its shape (image), its whinny (hearing), its strength (touch). When we use a metaphor as my cousin is a horse with his girlfriend, we intend to focus mainly on the horse strength, blending this aspect to the way he acts (physically or psychologically) towards his girlfriend. Our aim is, therefore, to discuss multimodal resources for metaphorical meanings, multimodal constructions in advertising discourse and multimodal metaphors of concepts in embodied mental sense simulation.  All these assets have the functional objective of framing the way the audience should build in their minds the world we are talking about according to our conscious or subconscious intentions. Language is part of the way we construct the world within our and our addressee´s minds.