Over centuries, scholars have explored how metaphor contributes to thought, language, culture. This collection of essays reflects on Müller, Kappelhoff, and colleagues' transdisciplinary (film ...studies and linguistics) approach formulated in "Cinematic Metaphor: Experience - Affectivity - Temporality". The key concept of cinematic metaphor opens up reflections on metaphor as a form of embodied meaning-making in human life across disciplines. The book documents collaborative work, reflecting intense, sometimes controversial, discussions across disciplinary boundaries. In this edited volume, renowned authors explore how exposure to the framework of Cinematic Metaphor inspires their views of metaphor in film and of metaphor theory and analysis more generally. Contributions include explorations from the point of view of applied linguistics (Lynne Cameron), cognitive linguistics (Alan Cienki), media studies (Kathrin Fahlenbrach), media history (Michael Wedel), philosophy (Anne Eusterschulte), and psychology (Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr.).
Metaphors in audiovisual media receive increasing attention from film and communication studies as well as from linguistics and multimodal metaphor research. The specific media character of film, and ...thus of cinematic metaphor, remains, however, largely ignored. Audiovisual images are all too frequently understood as iconic representations and material carriers of information. Cinematic Metaphor proposes an alternative: starting from film images as affective experience of movement-images, it replaces the cognitive idea of viewers as information-processing machines, and heals the break with rhetoric established by conceptual metaphor theory. Subscribing to a phenomenological concept of embodiment, a shared vantage point for metaphorical meaning-making in film-viewing and face-to-face interaction is developed. The book offers a critique of cognitive film and metaphor theories and a theory of cinematic metaphor as performative action of meaning-making, grounded in the dynamics of viewers' embodied experiences with a film. Fine-grained case studies ranging from Hollywood to German feature film and TV news, from tango lesson to electoral campaign commercial, illustrate the framework's application to media and multimodality analysis.
Taking the interrelationship of language and thought as starting point, Cognitive Linguistics considers language as providing central insights into cognitive structures and processes as well as into ...their experiential basis. In its role as a gateway for exploring and describing phenomena at the interface between the individual and society by means of public language use, Cognitive Linguistics thus ranges between the poles of trans-situational, overarching language structures and situated, specific language use. But how exactly are system and use to be distinguished and related to one another? What range has, for example, a particular political frame detected from a sample of media coverage with regard to ‘its’ audience? When can we reliably label several instances of individual language use as an overarching language pattern or a frame? The paper aims to address these and further questions in reference to Critical Cognitive Linguistics concerning, for one thing, its own theoretical and methodological assumptions and, for another, its social role in light of current social and political phenomena and developments.
Although recent linguistic and media-studies' research has increasingly dealt with forms of imagery beyond language, such as in audiovisual formats, only little attention has been paid to the ...specific media character of audiovisual images. This raises a theoretical as well as methodological problem: How can processes of figurative meaning making in audiovisual media be adequately conceptualized and described? The book intends to bridge this research gap with an analysis of campaign commercials, a hitherto largely underexplored object of study in metaphor and metonymy research. To achieve this goal, a transdisciplinary film-analytical and cognitive-linguistic account of audiovisual figurativity is developed and examined through a comparative analysis of figurative meaning-making processes in German and Polish campaign commercials from 2009 and 2011. By setting the inseparable intertwining of language and cinematic staging, sensing and understanding center stage, the book provides insight into the dynamic nature and embodied affective grounds of audiovisual figurativity, and challenges the long-known dichotomies of rational discourse and affective manipulation, political message and media effect.
