Diskurslinguistik
Institut für Linguistik
D-50923 Köln

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Raum 4.06.
D-50929 Köln 

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Figurative and non-figurative conceptions of loss, grief, and coping in German and English picturebooks: A multimodal cognitive account

Human beings are naturally drawn to the usage of metaphorical constructions to verbalise their thoughts and feelings (Lakoff & Johnson (2003 [1980]). In picturebooks, this is realised by combining different modes/modalities such as text, image and colour (Kress 2010). Thus, as multimodally designed objects, picturebooks are particularly useful for an analysis: they convey meaning through each mode and across modes, in the present case to represent grief, the resulting behaviour and the overall process of grief, as well as coping with loss. Moreover, research on grief so far only includes either literary approaches or focuses on content analyses, while metaphorical representations and metonymic components are disregarded. My research attempts to fill this gap by contributing to linguistic as well as literary research with a multimodal cognitive focus.
First of all, instead of investigating just the conceptualisation of death, the present study embraces the discursive and dynamic dimensions of the cognitive-emotional processes around someone’s death as stories unfold: (i) the sense of loss, (ii) the process of grieving, and (iii) the process of coping. The study explores the figurative and non-figurative representations of loss, grief, and coping in a corpus of 40 picturebooks published in the last 10 years and it applies a mix of qualitative and quantitative analytical methods. 
The annotation process involves attention to textual and pictorial cues, following a four-step-schema (topic, expression, conceptualisation, communication) to identify and analyse metaphorical constructions, inspired by recent cognitive-semiotic work (in particular Stampoulidis & Bolognesi 2023 and Zlatev 2024). The analysis also compares the level of metaphoricity in the textual parts and in their pictorial counterparts. In fact, the verbal material usually shows a lesser degree of elaboration in both length and content, compared to the images. Moreover, verbal representations might directly skip information and details that are conversely offered by the pictures (Salisbury & Stiles 2020). Further discrepancies may regard the verbally literal vs. pictorial figurative level of representation. 
The results concern the extent to which expected source domains, such as Journey, Container or Force (Lakoff & Turner 1989), are or are not occurring, and the extent to which the representation of mental states shows a higher metaphoricity with respect to the representation of bodily reactions. 

References 

Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson (2003[1980]). Metaphors we live by. Chicago/London: Chicago University Press.
Lakoff, George & Mark Turner (1989). More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago/London: Chicago University Press.
Kress, Gunther (2010). Multimodality. A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication, London/New York: Routledge.
Salisbury, Martin & Morag Styles (2020). Children’s Picturebooks. The art of visual storytelling, 2nd ed.. London: Lawrence King.
Stampoulidis, Georgios & Marianna Bolognesi (2023). Bringing metaphors back to the streets: a corpus-based study for the identification and interpretation of rhetorical figures in street art, Visual Communciation 22 (2), 243–277.
Zlatev, Jordan (2024). Constraining metaphor and metonymy in language and depiction: A cognitive semiotics approach, Studies in logic, grammar and rhetoric 69 (82), 7–29.