An Experimental Study on Visual Metaphor

Abstract

newline For long it has been argued that metaphor is not merely a linguistic device newlineused figuratively in poems and literature, but a conceptual process that plays newlinea central role in cognition. Several attempts have been made to consider newlinemetaphor as a conceptual phenomenon (Ortony, 1979; Lakoff and Johnson, newline1980). Most notably, Richards (1936) argued that thought is metaphoric and newlineproceeds by comparison, and the metaphor of language derive there newlinefrom (1936:94). Lakoff and his colleagues proposed conceptual theory of newlinemetaphor and argued that human cognition is organized in conceptual newlineschemas, which are metaphoric in nature. These schemas are constantly newlineenriched and modified by the interaction with the world. Language draws on newlinethese cognitive schemas but is not identical with them. Moreover, verbal newlinemetaphors are surface manifestations of the metaphorical grounding of these newlineschemas. Therefore, metaphor is fundamentally conceptual, not linguistic in newlinenature (Lakoff, 1993). One of the crucial outcomes of this cognitivist newlineparadigm is its implication that metaphor can assume non-verbal and multimodal manifestations as well. newlineThe focus of this thesis is on visual metaphors, which are pictorial newlinecounterparts of verbal metaphors such as The sky is crying, or The man is newlinea wolf. Visual or pictorial metaphor is nonverbal manifestation of newlinemetaphorical thought, where one or both concepts of the metaphor (the newlinetarget and the source) are depicted in images. In this thesis, our aim is to newlinestudy different kinds of visual metaphors: How are they generated and how newlineare they different from verbal metaphors. We focus on the difference newlinebetween them at the presentation level, which relates to the early stages of newlineperceptual processing. A verbal metaphor is presented as text but a visual newlinemetaphor is presented in images. Several psychological studies (Paivio, newline1989; Schnotz and Bannert 1999) have shown that text and images are newlineprocessed in different ways. Recent brain imaging studies have also newlineconfirmed that the right-hemisphere of the bra