LaMiCuS 2 (2018)
Special issue: Multimodality in communication, literature, and culture
In memoriam Prof. Alina Kwiatkowska
Table of contents / Spis treści
Od Redakcji 16-23
Prof. Alina Kwiatkowska in Memoriam
Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, A spark falls to the ground… darkens That’s it 24-31
Agnieszka Stanecka, All that is left is longing and silence 32-36
Bibliografia wybranych prac Prof. Aliny Kwiatkowskiej 37-43
Articles / Artykuły
Elżbieta Tabakowska, Iconicity in literature. The case study of Kontuzja by Zofia Bystrzycka (paper in Polish) / O ikoniczności w literaturze na przykładzie Kontuzji Zofii Bystrzyckiej 44-59
The article focuses on two fragments of Zofia Bystrzycka’s novel Kontuzja (“Injury”, 1997) with reference to the notion of iconicity. In its very nature, iconicity is a multimodal phenomenon that can assume a visual, auditory, or kinesthetic form, profoundly contextualized and grounded in an act of linguistic communication. The analysis shows that the notion of iconicity, firmly established in linguistic and semiotic tradition, can also prove valuable in literary studies, where it can help describe various kinds of parallelisms. For example, in the case of Kontuzja, we are dealing with a reversed symmetry of image-construction and expression of two polar emotional states of the protagonist: first, insecurity and fear in a situation of illness and potential death; then calm, relief, and joy upon receiving negative reasults of her medical tests.
Izabela Kraśnicka-Wilk, Sonia Gembalczyk, Multimodal YES (paper in Polish) / Multimodalne TAK 60-80
The aim of this article is to analyze the bodily and linguistic ways of expressing acceptance and affirmation by Polish language speakers. The source material consists of a number of audiovisual recordings containing a selection of verbal and non-verbal acts of nodding (i.a. excepts from original TV programmes or registered experiments performed by the students of The Faculty of Polish Studies at Jagiellonian University in Kraków).
In the article we put a particular emphasis on the communicative, semantic and pragmatic character of the whole analyzed utterance where the gesture of nodding accompanies verbal statements and other nonverbal signals, or appears alone, either as the expression of real states of the speaker or as the so-called culturally-determined emblematic gesture.
The proposed multimodal analysis aims to track various contexts of occurrence and various functions of nodding.
Elżbieta Górska, From music to language and back 82-103
Drawing on Daniel Barenboim’s BBC Reith Lectures of 2006, a number of verbo-musical metaphors is analysed in terms of the dynamic approach to metaphor (Müller 2008; Kolter et al. 2012) and the blending theory (Fauconnier 1997; Fauconnier & Turner 1998, 2002). The data are an interesting case of an intermodal translation which goes from music to language and back. On the one hand, the discussed creative metaphors illustrate Barenboim’s own insights on various aspects of life that he, as a practising musician, has gained from music. On the other hand, it is this music-derived knowledge about life that Barenboim wants to communicate to his BBC Reith Lectures’ audience using, first, the verbal mode, and then translating his linguistic descriptions back onto music. It is argued that Barenboim’s use of verbo-musical metaphors renders his persuasive rhetoric highly original and ingenious, and, at the same time, makes it easier to comprehend and remember. Of special interest is Barenboim’s use of the metaphors for shifting his viewpoint from that of the lecturer/teacher to that of someone who is learning about life from music. In this way, Barenboim establishes common ground between the speaker and his audience and introduces an intersubjective dimension to his lecture rhetoric.
Małgorzata Fabiszak, Ewa Olszewska, Axiological ambivalence of conceptual imagery in visual communication: Commemoration architecture and 3D art 104-131
Cognitive linguistics has expanded its research scope beyond language: Kwiatkowska (2013) offers a systematic application of a number of cognitive linguistic tools to visual communication. We combine her approach with Krzeszowski’s (1997) axiological semantics and embed them in the theory of collective memory. In particular, we take a look at two case studies: an analysis of a commemoration of a Jewish cemetery in an inner yard of a housing estate and an analysis of the 3D work of art “The Comfort and Service My Daddy Brings to Our Household” by Richard Dial. They allow us to examine the axiological potential of the container schema as applied to the memorial architecture and the axiology of the visual trope of a chair. The results show that while valuation is indeed inherent in conceptualisation, its axiological charge is highly context dependent.
Agnieszka Hamann, Multimodal meaning-making in classic Maya inscriptions 132-149
Maya glyphic inscriptions of the Classic Period (250-900 AD) are usually pairings of text and image which were created as one communicative act by expert users of semiotic resources. Maya scribes used a wide repertoire of literary and artistic means to encode the information they intended to send. Based on the methodology proposed by Bateman, Wildfeuer and Hiippala (2017), and building on my previous project on multimodality (Hamann 2017), this paper proposes a multimodal approach to the analysis of Maya inscriptions. In particular, it focuses on how the identified modalities cooperate to deliver the message, while also analysing the text/image pairings. It argues that the text and image cannot be separated and need to be analysed together, as they may change the reading of one another. To capture the entirety of the message in the selected inscriptions (Emiliano Zapata Panel, Sculpted Stone 1 from Bonampak and Altar 5 from Tikal), it analyses four dimensions of each text: the layout of the image and text and their interaction, highly conventionalized gestures adopted by the depicted persons, pictorial signs used within the image, and, last but not least, the text itself. This proposed methodological approach demonstrates that Maya texts were indeed multimodal products of culture, where the reader/viewer had to perform the composition of meaning-making possibilities, with each modality contributing towards the common communicative goal.
Michał Szawerna, Visual metaphorization of events as objects in comics 150-188
Situated at the intersection of cognitive linguistics, multimodality studies, and comics scholarship, this paper focuses on a representational strategy, embodied in multiple representational conventions, which enables creators of visual narratives referred to as comics to capture transitory, or non-durative, entities most commonly represented in comics: events. This paper specifically argues that creators of comics succeed in representing narrated events by spatializing them in the form of static planar objects: stand-alone musical notes and pieces of musical notation, individual pictograms and pictographic strings, individual letters and written texts, individual balloons and multiballoon chains, polymorphic and polyptychal repre sentations of motion events, etc. This paper further argues that static planar objects spatializing narrated events in comics may represent these events either cumulatively or non-cumulatively. A cumulative planar object (for example, a written onomatopoeia, a piece of musical notation, a string of pictograms, a chain of balloons) spatializes a narrated event by virtue of comprising a number of component planar objects which correspond to the temporal constituents (phases, stages, sub-events) of the spatialized event in a one-to-one fashion, but are simultaneously available for visual processing. In contrast, a non-cumulative planar object (for example, an individual musical note, letter, or pictogram) spatializes a narrated event as a whole, without explicitly representing the event’s temporal organization in its own spatial structure. With reference to examples reproduced from a number of published comics exemplifying various publication formats, generic conventions, and cultural traditions, this paper demonstrates that visual objectification is a major representational strategy employed by creators of comics, who are compelled by their medium of choice to capture transitory, non-durative entities — most notably, sound events, motion events, and mental events — in a static planar form. Additionally, this paper suggests that this representational strategy is particularly effective because it mirrors an understanding of events which is widely conventionalized in language, so that linguistic objectification of events and their visual objectification in comics may be regarded as counterpart manifestations, albeit in different media, of a certain intersubjective construal of events.
Janusz Badio, Looking for events in a video of mundane activity 190-207
The present work focuses on the unit of event, its psychological reality, and linguistic coding. The category of event has been defined as a segment of time with a beginning and end (Zacks & Tversky 2001). During this time something happens. Two related studies are presented based on Badio (2014). The first of them is a non-verbal study of video unitization in the search of events and their psychological reality, as well as ways in which people mark them off the stream of continuous activity. Perception of change of variable parameters of action has a decisive role in this process. The second study investigates verbalisations of the same video to conclude that the main independent variable, Polish-native and English-foreign verbalisations are similar with regard to the number of coded events, but a little different as far as some processing parameters are concerned. The paper presents the design, analysis of inferential statistics of the experiments, and provides suggestions for improvement. It also focuses on a few other variables related to this topic that can be used in future research.
Francis F. Steen, Anders Hougaard, Jungseock Joo, Inés Olza, Cristóbal Pagán Cánovas, Anna Pleshakova, Soumya Ray, Peter Uhrig, Javier Valenzuela, Jacek Woźny, Mark Turner, Toward an infrastructure for data-driven multimodal communication research, 208-224
Research into the multimodal dimensions of human communication faces a set of distinctive methodological challenges. Collecting the datasets is resource-intensive, analysis often lacks peer validation, and the absence of shared datasets makes it difficult to develop standards. External validity is hampered by small datasets, yet large datasets are intractable. Red Hen Lab spearheads an international infrastructure for data-driven multimodal communication research, facilitating an integrated cross-disciplinary workf low. Linguists, communication scholars, statisticians, and computer scientists work together to develop research questions, annotate training sets, and develop pattern discovery and machine learning tools that handle vast collections of multimodal data, beyond the dreams of previous researchers. This infrastructure makes it possible for researchers at multiple sites to work in real-time in transdisciplinary teams. We review the vision, progress, and prospects of this research consortium.
Magdalena Zawisławska, Marta Falkowska, Maciej Ogrodniczuk, Verbal synaesthesia in the Polish corpus of synaesthetic metaphors 226-253
This paper offers the use of figurative language found in online blogs and used as source material for the research project Synamet, the aim of which is to create a semantically and grammatically annotated corpus of synaesthetic metaphors for Polish. A particular emphasis of the proposed article is laid upon the verbal synaesthesia found in the corpus. It is argued that the analysis of synaesthetic metaphors found in the material depicts some limitations of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory as proposed by Lakoff & Johnson (2008 /1980/) when applied to discourse analysis. Therefore, more efficient methods of describing figurative expressions should be elaborated.
Review Articles / Artykuły recenzyjne
Agata Kochańska, What tigers like best: grammar, situated meaning, and subtle interpersonal semantics. Magdalena Rybarczyk 2015: Demonstratives and Possessives with Attitude. An Intersubjectively-Oriented Empirical Study. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins 254-272
Reviews / Recenzje
Michał Szawerna 2017: Metaphoricity of Conventionalized Diegetic Images in Comics: A Study in Multimodal Cognitive Linguistics. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, Reviewed by Charles Forceville 274-279
Hubert Kowalewski 2016: Motivating the Symbolic: Towards a Cognitive Theory of the Linguistic Sign. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, Reviewed by Maruszka Meinard 280-286
Carsten Levisen and Sophia Waters (eds.) 2017: Cultural Keywords in Discourse. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, Reviewed by Adam Głaz 288-296
Joanna Szadura 2017. Czas jako kategoria językowo-kulturowa w polszczyźnie. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS, recenzja Agnieszki Libury 298-303