Project objectives

In the project “Multimodal metaphors and expressive movement” we are examining the interplay of perception, emotional sensation and understanding in face-to-face and mediated processes of interaction and we are searching for means to describe them.

In order to study this fundamental dimension, we bring together linguistic approaches to multimodal metaphors (Müller) and the analytical film-studies concept of expressive movement (Kappelhoff). The study of the phenomena of multimodal metaphors and audiovisual expressive movement can be joined because both concepts can be understood in terms of processuality and temporality. Embodiment also plays a decisive role in both theories:

  • in cognitive linguistic theories of metaphor, processes of embodiment and cognition are central to studies of metaphors in everyday communication. Interacting partners communicate not only verbally, but with the aid of gestures–that is multimodally in the interplay of verbal and gestural expression. In applied linguistics, this multimodal property is the key to gaining access to and reconstructing the cognitive process itself.
  • Film and media studies theories of affect focus on the connection between emotional and audiovisual movements. Cinematic images are, from this perspective, composed moving images that, for the viewer, unfold a path of emotions, moods and atmospheres. Viewers walk this path by perceiving it, and experience these processes in their own bodies. Using the concept of audiovisual expressive movement, the arousal and manipulation of viewer emotions through cinematic images can be captured.

These two approaches and the analytical methods connected to them come together in the research project “Multimodal metaphors and expressive movement.” Through intensive interdisciplinary discussions of a series of case studies we arrived at the collaborative theoretical model of the affect-based embodied emergence of meaning. We assume that everything film and television viewers and communication partners understand is first and foremost based on and emerges from sensory perception and affective processes of embodiment.

An additional objective of this project is the development of new methods of analyzing metaphors and expressive movement. We aim to create methods that make possible the empirical reconstruction—using standardized procedures of description and forms of representation—of the linkage of affective and cognitive processes in a comparative perspective for the following phenomena:

face-to-face communication

audiovisual forms

narration
argumentation



TV news
TV series
German feature films
classical Hollywood cinema (Hitchcock, Film Noir)

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