A Multimodal Metaphor Analysis of English Cancer Awareness Campaigns in Digital Media

Abstract

Image-word relation has an overwhelming presence across many studies responding to the Pictorial Turn era. However, due to the linguistic bias of metaphor studies, multimodal metaphors have yet to receive comprehensive systematic attention. Consequently, the conceptualization of metaphors across the modalities and sign systems remains a subject of ongoing academic inquiry. The present study is thus designed to respond to this problem in the media discourse of cancer awareness campaigns by pursuing the following aims: (1) analyzing metaphoric conceptualization through a multidimensional approach to intersemiotic convergence in multimodal texts, (2) detecting the most frequent source domains to better understand the underlying objectives of these campaigns, (3) determining patterns of modal dominance, (4) identifying the projected conceptual features that are mapped from the source domain onto the target domain, (5) revealing the principles and marks of the visual representation of conceptual metaphors. Methodologically, this study employs an eclectic five-level methodological model. First, multimodal metaphors are verbalized through the semiotic relation that requires a convergence notion across modalities. Second, the verbalized conceptual metaphors are identified in accordance with Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Third, these metaphors are mapped using Yang’s (2015) classification to determine the semiotic distribution of source and target domains across verbal and pictorial modes. Fourth, modal dominance is determined using the typology proposed by Tasić and Stamenković (2015), categorizing the multimodal metaphors as text-dominant, image-dominant, or complementary. Finally, the components of the metaphorical images are analyzed through the social semiotic lens of Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2021) Grammar of Visual Design. This provides a comprehensive cognitive analysis of the selected dataset, covering 10 images from English-language cancer awareness campaigns. This study concludes that intersemiotic convergence extends beyond the mere co-occurrence of verbal and visual modes; rather, it is a conceptual category that brings together more than one meaning-making semiotic resource to construct metaphorical conceptualizations.