TEXT-IMAGE RELATIONS IN CARTOONS. A CASE STUDY OF IMAGE SCHEMATIC METAPHORS

Abstract

As compared to their purely verbal manifestations, multimodal realizations of image schematic metaphors have received far too little attention in cognitive linguistics than they would deserve. It will be argued that image schemas (Johnson 1987, Talmy 1988), since they are skeletal conceptual structure, afford an excellent source domain for metaphors that are realized verbo-visually in cartoons. The cartoons selected for this study are all by Janusz Kapusta, a Polish artist, whose works have appeared every week in the Polish magazine “Plus-Minus” for over ten years. In contrast to the gestural medium, films and music, where the relevant elements of image schematic source domains of metaphor are never fully available at once, the cartoons give a “snapshot” of a conceptual image which is ready for inspection as a single Gestalt. They are therefore a good testing ground for discussing the question of how the visual and the verbal modality interact in spatialization of abstract ideas. Providing insights into the function of multimodal metaphors and levels of their activation, the discussion contributes to the ongoing debate on the conceptual nature of metaphor and the embodiment of meaning. The results of the study are also considered in relation to the role of verbo-pictorial metaphor in structuring abstract concepts in a creative way.