Reflections on developing Multimodal Metaphor Theory into Multimodal Trope Theory

Abstract

The publication of Lakoff and Johnson’s pioneering Metaphors We Live By (1980) launched Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which located the essence of this trope in cognition. This model entails that metaphors in language are no less but also no more than verbal manifestations of what is in the last resort a cognitive process. Unsurprisingly, scholars studying other discourses than (exclusively) verbal ones began to research how metaphors could be, and were, expressed both in co-speech gestures and in visual media. In more recent years, cognitivist scholars have begun to theorize and analyse verbal manifestations of other tropes besides metaphor, such as metonymy, antithesis, hyperbole, and irony. A logical next step is examining if, and if so, how, classic tropes can assume visual and multimodal forms. This paper discusses work that has been done in this area, launches some new proposals, and sketches desiderata of a truly “multimodal trope theory.”