According to Forceville (2019), the broadening of Conceptual Metaphor & Metonymy Theory (CMMT) “is excellent news for several reasons”, one of which being “the quickly growing discipline of “multimodality””. Forceville (2009: 23) defines monomodal metaphors as “metaphors whose target and source are exclusively or predominantly rendered in one mode”. These monomodal metaphors have been studied extensively, for example in the fields of literature and linguistics (verbal metaphors) or in the field of visual studies (pictorial metaphors). According to Forceville [2009: 23], modes “include, at least, the following: (1) pictorial signs; (2) written signs; (3) spoken signs; (4) gestures; (5) sounds; (6) music (7) smells; (8) tastes; (9) touch.” Müller (2009: 299), as for her, distinguishes between two different modes: “what is expressed orally and perceived primarily aurally as sound (the oral/aural modality)” on the one hand, and “bodily forms and movements in space which are primarily perceived visually (the spatial/visual modality)” on the other hand. Multimodal metaphors are defined as borrowing from different modes: “In contrast to monomodal metaphors, multimodal metaphors are metaphors whose target and source are each represented exclusively or predominantly in different modes” (Forceville 2009: 24). In other words, the source domain and the target domain are from different modes, for example the visual and the verbal modes, although one domain can be present in more than one mode.

These multimodal metaphors and metonymies have essentially been studied in advertisement, be it for profit, non-profit, institutional, promotional purposes, etc. (mostly for the combination of the visual and verbal modes), political discourse (mostly with the combination of the verbal mode and gestures, see Charteris-Black (2004), Müller (2009), Musolff (2016)), and films (see Coëgnarts (2012, 2015, 2019)). Such corpora can obviously be the focus of the presentations, but it seems interesting to study other corpora and other media as well, such as comics (see Forceville 2005, 2011), cartoons (see Górska 2019), op-ed illustrations, animation films (see Forceville and Jeulink 2011; Fahlenbrach 2017; Forceville and Paling 2018), logos, banners, placards, posters, street art and wall-paintings, memes, etc. (see Forceville 2019), but also music: “It is to be noticed, incidentally, that in most of this work the discussion of modes partaking in multimodal metaphor is restricted to the visual and the written-verbal mode. Multimodal metaphor research – and multimodal discourse analysis more generally – including the sonic and musical modes is still rare” (Forceville 2019: 374). The use of multimodal metaphor and metonymies in teaching will also be a relevant area of research for the conference.

If the main area of multimodal research was initially multimodal metaphors, a growing number of works started to investigate the role of multimodal metonymies. Forceville (2019: 371) rightly points out that we ‘live by metaphors’ – but we live by many other things – metonyms, stories, colour symbolism … – as well”, which calls for novel developments (see Forceville 2019): not only multimodal metaphors and metonymies should be studied, but also any multimodal tropes (hyperbole, irony, allegory, antithesis, oxymoron, onomatopoeia, etc.), following what Forceville (2019) calls “Cognitive Trope Theory”. The multimodal dimension of these tropes can be investigated, as well as the combination of multimodal metaphors and metonymies with the less frequently used tropes mentioned above.

Following the issues raised by Forceville (2019), the following questions can be addressed:

• The meaning of any multimodal interaction depends on the interaction of the various modes used, but what does “interaction” mean? Is it synonymous with combination? Reinforcement? Opposition? The various ways the modes can combine have to be further investigated.
• The question of the migration of a metaphor or metonymy from one mode to another mode or to a combination of modes (see Roman & Porto 2019) could also be addressed. As mentioned by Forceville (2019: 371), “Not only can a given metaphor develop within a medium, for instance in language; it is moreover bound to transform and adapt itself to some extent when it migrates to another medium, with its own affordances and constraints, such as visuals, visuals-plus-written texts, or music. Therefore, in two different media, a given metaphor may ‘hide and highlight’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 10-13) different aspects of the source domain”; the transformation or adaptation of one metaphor when it migrates to another mode therefore tends to prove that the interaction between two modes, or more, is not a mere, simple combination, and should be focused upon.
• The roles of clues / cues in the interpretation process of multimodal metaphors and metonymies could also be investigated, as well as the role of other media and other paralinguistic features.
• The issue of the genre and/or subgenre could also be tackled, as well as the variation across the genre and/or subgenre, as it may be relevant for the meaning generated by the combination of different modes. The question of the genres and contexts in which multimodality is more frequent could be investigated as well: are they any specific genres, contexts in which multimodality thrives on?
• Can multimodal tropes be used to manipulate and deceive speakers? What can be the potential dangers?
• Can specific patterns be brought out depending on the trope used, the conceptual domains resorted to, the genre in which multimodality operates, etc.?
• Finally, the aims, functions and effects of multimodal tropes could also be delved into, as they can trigger off very different effects in the audience: creativity, humor, criticism, persuasion, manipulation, intensification, awareness, etc., which reminds us that context is key in understanding the role of multimodality when it applies to tropes.

By its very nature, research on multimodality is interdisciplinary, and researchers from various disciplines are invited to submit proposals. Presentations will preferably focus on contemporary discourse (21^st century) and can focus on any language, as long as they are corpus-based or corpus-driven; the presentation will be given in English or French.

Selected references

Charteris-Black, Jonathan. (2004). Corpus approaches to critical metaphor analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Coëgnarts, Maarten & Peter Kravanja. (2012). From thought to modality: A theoretical framework for analysing structural-conceptual metaphor and image metaphor in film. Image [&] Narrative 13 (1). 96–113.

Coëgnarts, Maarten & Peter Kravanja (eds.). (2015). Embodied cognition and cinema. Leuven: Leuven University Press.

Coëgnarts, Maarten. (2019). Analyzing metaphor in film: Some conceptual challenges. In Ignasi Navarro i Ferrando (ed.), Current approaches to metaphor analysis in discourse. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Fahlenbrach, Kathrin (2017). Audiovisual metaphors and metonymies of emotions and depression in moving images. In Francesca Ervas, Elisabetta Gola, and Maria Grazia Rossi (eds.), Metaphor in communication, science and education, 95–117. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Ferrando, I. N. (Ed.). (2019). Current approaches to metaphor analysis in discourse (Vol. 39). Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.

Forceville, Charles & Eduardo Urios-Aparisi, Multimodal Metaphor, Walter de Gruyter, 2009.

Forceville, C. (2002). The identification of target and source in pictorial metaphors. Journal of pragmatics, 34(1), 1-14.

Forceville, C. (2008). Metaphor in pictures and multimodal representations. The Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought, 462-482.

Forceville, Charles. 2005. Visual representations of the Idealized Cognitive Model of anger in the Asterix album La Zizanie. Journal of Pragmatics 37. 69–88.

Forceville, Charles. 2011. Pictorial runes in Tintin and the Picaros. Journal of Pragmatics 43. 875–890.

Forceville, C. (2016). Visual and Multimodal Metaphor in Film. Embodied metaphors in film, television, and video games: Cognitive approaches, 17-32.

Forceville, C. (2019). Developments in multimodal metaphor studies: A response to Górska, Coëgnarts, Porto & Romano, and Muelas-Gil. Current approaches to metaphor analysis in discourse, 367-378.

Forceville, Charles & Marloes Jeulink. (2011). The flesh and blood of embodied understanding: the source-path-goal schema in animation film.” Pragmatics & Cognition 19 (1). 37–59.

Forceville, Charles & Sissy Paling. (2018). The metaphorical representation of DEPRESSION in short, wordless animation films. Journal of Visual Communication (published ahead of print 21-9-2018 at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1470357218797994).

Górska, Elżbieta (2019). Spatialization of abstract concepts in cartoons: A case study of verbo-pictorial image-schematic metaphors. In Ignasi Navarro i Ferrando (ed.), Current approaches to metaphor analysis in discourse, xxx-yyy. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Hidalgo Downing, Laura & Bianca Kraljevic Mujic. (2020). Performing Metaphoric Creativity across Modes and Contexts, John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Kappelhoff, H., & Müller, C. (2011). Embodied meaning construction: Multimodal metaphor and expressive movement in speech, gesture, and feature film. Metaphor and the social world, 1(2), 121-153.

Kress, Gunther. (2010). Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. London: Routledge.

Kress, Gunther & Theo van Leeuwen. (2001). Multimodal discourse. London: Arnold.

Kress, Gunther & Theo van Leeuwen. (2006). Reading images: The grammar of visual design. 2^nd edn. London: Routledge.

Müller, C., & Cienki, A. (2009). Words, gestures, and beyond: Forms of multimodal metaphor in the use of spoken language. In Multimodal metaphor (pp. 297-328). De Gruyter Mouton.

Musolff, Andreas. (2016). Political metaphor analysis: Discourse and scenarios. London: Bloomsbury.

Sobrino, P. P. (2017). Multimodal metaphor and metonymy in advertising (Vol. 2). John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Zbikowski, L. M. (2009). Music, language, and multimodal metaphor. Multimodal metaphor, 359-381.