Abstract
One of the dominant viewpoints in the study of signs has been their social character, as proposed by social semiotics. However, recent findings in the sphere of advertising have suggested the possibility of the 'global' nature of meaning-making.
One of the tools has successfully emerged from the blend of cognitive linguistics and multimodal studies, incorporating the use of 'image schemas' in car branding (Perez Hernandez, 2013). This paper aims to question the social semiotic property of sign, in the context related to 'burning problems of modernity, in particular, infographics aimed at spreading information on COVID-19.
A corpus of environmental infographics has been analyzed with a view to spot generalities in carefully selected texts. Our findings might suggest that multimodal image schemas have a huge potential to make multimodal texts globally comprehensible.
The paper takes into consideration only the most salient features of COVID-19 infographic, which bear little reference to other, closely contextual or social, factors. What is more, this approach might facilitate more thorough research into a range of rhetorical properties of multimodal texts for a variety of purposes, in particular, in terms of ideological aspects.
The increasingly globalized society has brought about new challenges and concepts, in particular, multimodality, which could be characterized as the interrelationship between different semiotic 'modes' in human communication. These could comprise text, gesture, image, colour, shape, vectors as well as their interplay.
Contrary to the previously held belief, textual modes are quite rarely the modes of 'high- priority' in comparison to other modes, when it comes to meaning-making (Kress & van Leeuwen 2006). The basic premise of multimodal discourse analysis rests on the conviction that the overall effect is much more than a mere sum of the constituent parts (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006).
In relation to this, although there have been numerous approaches aimed at analyzing multimodal texts, little has been done about marrying Multimodality and Cognitive Semiotics, in order to foreground theoretical and empirical understanding of their relations. The pool of scholars researching the interrelation between multimodality and Cognitive linguistics, comprise Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) who provide a comprehensive insight into the basics of 'visual grammar'; Jewitt (2009) with a wide range of theoretical approaches to multimodal communication and representation from a variety of disciplines including sociolinguistics, anthropology and visual studies; Gibbons (2014) presenting the concept of 'multimodal cognitive poetics'; O'Halloran (2011) focused on multimodal studies aimed at developing methodologies and theories applicable to the domain of multimodality.
These variety of approaches, on the one hand, contributes to the bulk of research into the previously unexplored concept, while, on the other hand, provide an innumerable caleidoscope of methods and theories, which problematizes the scientific grounding and methods of analysis in the domain of multimodality. For the purpose of this research, the basic premise is rooted in the notion of multimodal metaphor, as approached by Forceville (2009), with a view to find the conjunction between metaphoric representation and cognitive 'image schemas'.
Image schemas are used as a tool for analyzing COVID-19 Infographic, as the target digital text, in order to define the persistent features throughout a number of texts, which could confirm the assumption that certain image-schemas are universally meaningful worldwide, rather that resting on the social semiotic principles only.