ABSTRACT
Often evoked to provide evidence for the metaphorical and metonymic nature of abstract thought and its bodily basis in particular, emotion concepts have attracted a lot of attention ever since Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) seminal work. Such claims have been commonly based on linguistic analyses alone. This study, by contrast, focuses on a verbo-pictorial expression of two general concepts: emotion and feeling, and a number of more specific concepts (love, pain, happiness, unhappiness, loneliness, worries, despair, and hope) in cartoons by Janusz Kapusta, a Polish artist. Relying on the fundamental cognitive assumptions on how we understand abstract concepts, it is argued that Kapusta’s multimodal rendering of emotion concepts is based on a creative reworking of conventional image-schematic metaphors, such as emotional distance is physical distance, emotional states are objects/locations, body is the container for emotions. The study thus brings supportive evidence for the claim that image schemas provide structure and logic to our understanding of emotion concepts in multimodal discourse. Two other findings further corroborate the assumption on the conceptual nature of metaphor and metonymy and their role in expression of abstract thought: (i) the frequent coding of image schemas in the pictorial medium that is not dependent on how they are expressed verbally, and (ii) the recurring metonymic cueing of such image-schematic domains in the drawings. At the same time, the diverse interplay of the verbal and the pictorial modes in expressing what Müller calls “metaphoricity indicators” (2008a, 198) reveals that the dynamic activation of metaphoricity is a common phenomenon in multimodal discourse.
