MULTIMODAL METAPHORS IN THE EARLY MODERN TIME

Abstract

This article discusses the approaches to the phenomenon of multimodality in the works of Russian and foreign linguists. Examples are given of studies of multimodality on the material of modern texts, as well as on the historical material. Despite a certain consolidation of approaches to multimodality, the terms “mode” and “modality” still require clarification. The study of multimodality opens new perspectives for analyzing conceptual metaphors. This article examines the essence of multimodal metaphor and how it differs from monomodal metaphor. On the example of several Early Modern multimodal metaphors we illustrate the influence of the social and cultural context, the specificity of the process of metaphorization, historical continuity and the universal nature of the conceptual metaphor. These theoretical positions are illustrated on the example of the metaphor “the world is a theatre”, which dominated the worldview paradigm of the 15th–18th centuries. Three aspects of the metaphor of theatre are described — structural, ontological and performative aspect. A special manifestation of this metaphor is the tradition of naming non-fiction texts of various topics with the Latin lexeme theatrum or its equivalents in the national languages. The diversity of manifestations of the metaphor “the world is a theatre” in different modes raises the question of the need to consider this phenomenon as a blended space in which individual realizations of the metaphor form a special conceptual unity, complementing each other and exerting mutual influence. In conclusion, we state that the analysis of conceptual metaphor from the perspective of multimodality is productive and outline the difficulties that arise when studying the conceptual metaphors from distant periods.