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Article published In:
Visual Metaphors
Edited by Réka Benczes and Veronika Szelid
[Cognitive Linguistic Studies 7:1] 2020
► pp. 31–57
Theories of visual and linguistic metaphor

Uncanny resemblance

Words, pictures, and conceptual representations in the field of metaphor

 | Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
 | University of Bologna
What is the relation between the three following elements: words, pictures, and conceptual representations? And how do these three elements work, in defining and explaining metaphors? These are the questions that we tackle in our interdisciplinary contribution, which moves across cognitive linguistics, cognitive sciences, philosophy and semiotics. Within the cognitive linguistic tradition, scholars have assumed that there are equivalent and comparable structures characterizing the way in which metaphor works in language and in pictures. In this paper we analyze contextual visual metaphors, which are considered to be the most complex ones, and we compare them to those that in language are called indirect metaphors. Our proposal is that a syllogistic mechanism of comprehension permeates both metaphors expressed in the verbal modality as well as metaphors expressed in the pictorial modality. While in the verbal modality the metaphoric syllogism is solved by inference, we argue that in the pictorial modality the role of inference is performed through mental imagery.
Keywords: visual metaphor, linguistic metaphor, conceptual metaphor, picture perception, visual mental imagery
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Visual metaphors as elliptic syllogisms
  • 3.The relationship between the picture-maker and the viewer
  • 4.Visual perception and mental imagery
  • 5.Invariance Principle, occlusion shape and occlusion size
  • 6.Aesthetically relevant properties represented by mental imagery
  • 7.Imagery view of visual metaphors
  • 8.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 August 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cogls.00048.cav
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