In this last seminar before the summer, our guest PhD student from Sun Yat-sen University, Di Wu will present ongoing work related to her thesis work, focusing on metonymy in the framework of the Motivation & Sedimentation Model (MSM). This will be a purely online seminar - so welcome to the link, with cameras on, starting from 3pm. The talk will be about 45 minutes long, ending with 30 minutes discussion. Then we take a break - and resume again on August 31st.

Aiming for empirical validity, metaphor scholars have developed procedures for identifying metaphors in verbal text, such as MIP (Pragglejaz Group 2007) and MIPVU (Steen et al. 2010), as well as in pictures, such VisMip (Šorm and Steen 2018), and in verbo-pictorial representations such as street art (Stampoulidis et al. 2019). While metonymy has gained much interest in the past decades, there has been less effort to provide corresponding identification procedures for it, especially when moving beyond the semiotic system of language. Based on the classical analysis of metaphor and metonymy as (verbal or non-verbal) sign-use that is based, respectively, on the similarity and contiguity of meanings (Jakobson 1971) we propose the following theoretical definition of the concept, in accordance with the Motivation & Sedimentation Model (Zlatev 2023): An (a) act of sign use, (b) involving one or more semiotic systems (e.g., language, gesture, depiction), where (c) the intended meaning (d) is understood through another, more directly represented meaning, (e) which it does not resemble (as in metaphor) but is rather related to it in a part-whole or contiguity-based relationship. We show how this definition can be operationalized into an identification procedure, which we apply to a sample of political cartoons on the topic of the war in Ukraine, identifying (verbo) pictorial metaphors and metonymies.