A cognitive semiotic exploration of metaphors in Greek street art

Abstract

Cognitive linguistic and semiotic accounts of metaphor have addressed similar issues such as universality, conventionality, context-sensitivity, cross-cultural variation, creativity, and “multimodality.” However, cognitive linguistics and semiotics have been poor bedfellows and interactions between them have often resulted in cross-talk. This paper, which focuses on metaphors in Greek street art, aims to improve this situation by using concepts and methods from cognitive semiotics, notably the conceptual-empirical loop and methodological triangulation. In line with the cognitive semiotics paradigm, we illustrate the significance of the terminological and conceptual distinction between semiotic systems (language, gesture, and depiction) and sensory modalities (sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste). Thus, we restrict the term multimodality to the synergy of two or more different sensory modalities and introduce the notion of polysemiotic communication in the sense of the intertwined use of two or more semiotic systems. In our synthetic approach, we employ the Motivation and Sedimentation Model (MSM), which distinguishes between three interacting levels of meaning making: the embodied, the sedimented, and the situated. Consistent with this, we suggest a definition of metaphor, leading to the assertion that metaphor is a process of experiencing one thing in terms of another, giving rise to both tension and iconicity between the two “things” (meanings, experiences, concepts). By reviewing an empirical study on unisemiotic and polysemiotic metaphors in Greek street art, we show that the actual metaphorical interpretation is ultimately a matter of situated and socio-culturally-sensitive sign use and hence a dynamic and creative process in a real-life context.

Bringing metaphors back to the streets: a corpus-based study for the identification and interpretation of rhetorical figures in street art

“…Table 1. Methodological triangulation for the study of particular semiotic phenomena -here street art (adapted from Stampoulidis et al, 2019).…”

“…I n T r O D u C T I O n Cognitive linguistic and semiotic accounts of metaphor have often discussed this complex phenomenon in various ways, often addressing factors such as universality and conventionality, context-sensitivity, cross-cultural variation and creativity, deliberateness and multimodality. However, for the most part, such factors are investigated in isolation, since cognitive linguistics and semiotics have been poor bedfellows and interactions between them have resulted in much cross-talk (Stampoulidis et al, 2019).…”

Stories of resistance in Greek street Art: A cognitive-semiotic approach

“…It is important to understand for what reasons street art and graffiti exist as movements that insist on occupying urban space and to discuss the differences between these media, since practitioners of street art and graffiti themselves draw demarcation lines between them. To simplify, we may 2 Semiotic systems can in general be defined as signs with in-system specific affordances and interrelations and include language, depiction (still and moving images) and gesture (Stampoulidis et al, 2019;Zlatev, 2019). In narratological terms, narratives may be expressed in all these three semiotic systems (Prince, 1982).…”

“…• Ephemerality in the sense that street art is not meant to last for long, as artworks continuously change and evolve throughout time, or may be just removed. • Playfulness in the sense of creativity and potential rhetoricalness (for an analysis of metaphors and other rhetorical figures in street art, see Stampoulidis et al, 2019;Stampoulidis and Bolognesi, in press). • Contemporariness in the sense that street art is supposedly part-and-parcel of what is happening in a society in a specific time and space.…”

“…So called "street art of resistance" (Awad and Wagoner, 2017), the socio-cultural practice of street art as a new form of activism and political struggle, has the unique ability to trace political and cultural tensions mediating historical and socio-political underlying stories into the surface of the city towards new "spaces of hope" (Harvey, 2000;Novy and Colomp, 2013). In short, street art may be understood as an open, unsanctioned, ephemeral, creative and contemporary socio-cultural medium in urban space, that typically incorporates two interacting semiotic systems (language and depiction), and thus, polysemiotic (Stampoulidis et al, 2019;Zlatev, 2019), often addressing, but not limited to, socio-political issues.…”