ABSTRACT
Focusing on the role of image schemas in metaphorical understanding of human life, this case study examines another sample of verbo-pictorial aphorisms by Janusz Kapusta, a Polish artist. Among them, the construal of life as a long-term purposeful activity is by far the most common, and therefore it is not surprising that the path image schema and the characteristic affordance of path that is grasped by the motion schema provide experiential grounds for understanding diverse aspects of this abstract concept. The less common conceptions are exemplified by a few aphorisms that construe life as a game and a show; in these examples, the image-schematic structuring, though foundational, is less evident since it is embedded in culturally elaborate and rich constructs. Except for two examples, the analysed multimodal aphorisms are all based on conventional metaphors. It is the “creative reworking” of conventional mappings, in either one mode or across the verbal and the pictorial modes, that accounts for the novelty of the discussed metaphors. In more general terms, this study provides further support to the dynamic theory of metaphor, since it makes it apparent that the degree of overlap of the elements cued in the two modes varies considerably and, by the same token, activation levels of metaphoric source and target domains turn out to be gradable and dynamic. It is also argued that the novelty of the mapping should be included among the factors that may increase the metaphor’s activation level.
