Abstract:

Ever since the publication of Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, we have treated metaphor not so much a literary phenomenon as a cognitive one. Recently, however, metaphor studies have taken a multimodal turn, analyzing how metaphors are visually manifested in advertisements (Forceville, 1996; Urios-Aparisi, 2009) and editorial cartoons (El Refaie, 2009; Teng, 2009). Although such studies are prevalent, these have fallen short on conceptualizing an explicit procedure for visual metaphor identification that does not assume visual elements to already be in a metaphoric relationship. One recent procedure which does provide an explicit methodology is Šorm and Steen’s Visual Metaphor Identification Procedure (VISMIP) (2018). Despite the differences between verbal and visual metaphors, VISMIP considers cross-domain-ness as one common point of analysis between target and source, characterizing such relationships as either cross-domain or not (Šorm and Steen, 2018, p. 73). Using VISMIP to analyze three editorial cartoons, this paper builds on the binary conception of cross-domain-ness and, in turn, argues for a spectral approach in which target-and-source comparisons occur on varying levels of cross-domain-ness vis-à-vis the presence of an overlapping hypernym and their relative semantic relationship with it. As a result, this study proposes four degrees of cross-domain-ness: (1) absolute cross-domain-ness, where the target and source are totally distinct; (2) superior cross-domain-ness, where the target is semantically closer to the overlapping hypernym than the source; (3) inferior cross-domain-ness, where the target is semantically farther to the overlapping hypernym than the source; and (4) cohyponymic cross-domain-ness, where the target and source fall under the same hypernym and semantic layer. Ultimately, this paper also explores how VISMIP, being a recent development in the area of multimodal metaphor, shows a lot of promise in furthering studies on Philippine media; the dearth of which proves appealing to future language researchers and metaphor analysts alike.