Our former visiting PhD student, and now Dr. Di (Dee) Wu, will present an extended version of the talk she gave this summer at the IACS6 conference: see the abstract below. Since she will be on a link, and it will be a shorter talk (ca. 45 min + 30 min discussion), we will hold this on zoom only. All on the mailing list will receive the link a week in advance, and others can contact me. Welcome in from 15:00, with cameras on, as usual!

Metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche have been studied for millennia, but their definitions and identification remain inconsistent, particularly in non-verbal texts like films, advertisements, and cartoons. Further, since metaphor and metonymy interact (Goossens 1990), any adequate approach and efficient identification procedure must take this into account. To address these challenges, we adopted a cognitive-semiotic approach, emphasizing that these figures are sign processes, with expressions in one semiotic system or another rather than purely mental constructs (Zlatev 2024), and proceed by employing a methodology that closely aligns theoretical constructs and operational definitions. Following the theoretical definitions of metaphor and metonymy in cognitive semiotics, and extending it to synecdoche, we propose a novel identification procedure for the three figures. We applied this to a sample of Chinese environmental cartoons, and in the process were able to refine and formulate the procedure with a high degree of translation validity, i.e., corresponding well to the theoretical constructs (Zlatev & Moskaluk 2022). 

Our analysis shows that the most common figures in the sample were metaphors and metonymies, with much fewer cases of synecdoche; most images involved two or more different figures and were thus polyfigural; of these, the most common combination was metaphor and metonymy, with metaphor tending to construct metaphorical chains and interact with metonymies; metonymy also tended to construct metonymic chains, while synecdoche interacted the least with the other figures. These findings support the view of metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche as sign processes that typically co-occur within the same text, in the broad sense used in semiotics, independent of the type of semiotic system.

Goossens, L. (1990). Metaphtonymy: The interaction of metaphor and metonymy in expressions for linguistic action. Cognitive Linguistics, 1(3), 323–342.

Zlatev, J. (2024). Constraining metaphor and metonymy in language and depiction: A cognitive semiotics approach. Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric, 60(1), 7–29.

Zlatev, J., & Moskaluk, K. (2022). Translation validity in metaphor theories CMT, DMT and the Motivation & Sedimentation Model. In A. Bagasheva, B. Hristov, & N. Tincheva (Eds.), Figurative thought and language (pp. 123–148). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.