5th Nov 2015 Public Lecture by Barbara Dancygier on making meaning in multi-modality
Thursday, 5 Nov 2015, 21:17
Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Steve Bamlett, Thursday, 5 Nov 2015, 21:25
I visited this lecture with a purpose in mind. I've just started E845 on 'Applied linguistics' and I'm thinking of areas for my end-of-term project. I want to marry up some interests in multimodal communication in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) AND the role of embodiment in the relationship between metaphor and viewpoint. This is very much the arena of Dancygier's current work. this lecture was a great chance to start work on it.
When I look at my interests I realise that, although I know I want to study these topics my grasp of them remains as yet only shadowy - perhaps 'vague' is the less flattering term. I need to read her book on 'Figurative Language' and 'The Language of Stories' first. Here then is a very little of what I got from this stimulating lecture as a 'sample' and as a memo for me as E845 progresses.
The best way I can think of doing this is to take one of the instances of how conceptual viewpoint becomes the basis of 'meaning-making'. She looks at how embodied imagery in a passage of Virginia Woolf maps the body and the position from which we are seeing in a description of daffodils in To The Lighthouse:
'the flowers standing there, looking before them, looking up, yet beholding nothing, eyeless and therefore terrible.'
Initially mapping the 'flower' against the body as seen externally, standing', meaning is complicated by a shift of viewpoint to the subject position of the flower itself - but a subject description that is 'eyeless' (I-less?). I feel an intertextual moment here - the world of Milton's Samson Agonistes, 'Eyeless in Gaza' - but more important, as Dancygier says (if I have yet begun to understand her), is that it is the gestural contortion of body position from which meaning originates that really fills this language with meaning - even when that meaning is seeing 'nothing', time and prospect as nothing. The Woolfian domain of play indeed.
We start Dancygier argues with simple image schemas in language, which we might use every day and which form relatively simple conceptual structures. Thus a wall, as word or image is a 'block' to a conceptual viewpoint, but it can be manipulated as our viewpoint of it changes until it is rich with meaning - a point she illustrates from famous speeches on the BERLIN wall and its fate. A 'bottom-up' process starts with simple schemas, manipulates them using various techniques - the most important of which is re-construal, In this one complex image domain is interpreted through another, thus one journalist reconstrues the American middle-class in the image of Bouazizi, the man whose self-immolated body started the Tunisian revolt against corrupt government, because the journalist locates each domain in in a conceptually simpler schema of embodied despair.
I need to think on this more. Professor Dancygier offered us 'infinite riches in a little room' (to quote Volpone and, in part, the event chair). I was glad to be there. I may, I hope, follow this up.
5th Nov 2015 Public Lecture by Barbara Dancygier on making meaning in multi-modality
I visited this lecture with a purpose in mind. I've just started E845 on 'Applied linguistics' and I'm thinking of areas for my end-of-term project. I want to marry up some interests in multimodal communication in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) AND the role of embodiment in the relationship between metaphor and viewpoint. This is very much the arena of Dancygier's current work. this lecture was a great chance to start work on it.
When I look at my interests I realise that, although I know I want to study these topics my grasp of them remains as yet only shadowy - perhaps 'vague' is the less flattering term. I need to read her book on 'Figurative Language' and 'The Language of Stories' first. Here then is a very little of what I got from this stimulating lecture as a 'sample' and as a memo for me as E845 progresses.
The best way I can think of doing this is to take one of the instances of how conceptual viewpoint becomes the basis of 'meaning-making'. She looks at how embodied imagery in a passage of Virginia Woolf maps the body and the position from which we are seeing in a description of daffodils in To The Lighthouse:
'the flowers standing there, looking before them, looking up, yet beholding nothing, eyeless and therefore terrible.'
Initially mapping the 'flower' against the body as seen externally, standing', meaning is complicated by a shift of viewpoint to the subject position of the flower itself - but a subject description that is 'eyeless' (I-less?). I feel an intertextual moment here - the world of Milton's Samson Agonistes, 'Eyeless in Gaza' - but more important, as Dancygier says (if I have yet begun to understand her), is that it is the gestural contortion of body position from which meaning originates that really fills this language with meaning - even when that meaning is seeing 'nothing', time and prospect as nothing. The Woolfian domain of play indeed.
We start Dancygier argues with simple image schemas in language, which we might use every day and which form relatively simple conceptual structures. Thus a wall, as word or image is a 'block' to a conceptual viewpoint, but it can be manipulated as our viewpoint of it changes until it is rich with meaning - a point she illustrates from famous speeches on the BERLIN wall and its fate. A 'bottom-up' process starts with simple schemas, manipulates them using various techniques - the most important of which is re-construal, In this one complex image domain is interpreted through another, thus one journalist reconstrues the American middle-class in the image of Bouazizi, the man whose self-immolated body started the Tunisian revolt against corrupt government, because the journalist locates each domain in in a conceptually simpler schema of embodied despair.
I need to think on this more. Professor Dancygier offered us 'infinite riches in a little room' (to quote Volpone and, in part, the event chair). I was glad to be there. I may, I hope, follow this up.