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20: Example of oxymoron or irony? To examine Forceville's criticism and arguments we look into some controversial examples that can be categorized differently in different contexts. Consider 20. Intuitively we may call it an oxymoron, in which when two strikingly opposite concepts are put together. For example, the following line from Tennyson's Idylls of the King contains two oxymora. " And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true. " .
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The use of the metaphor of verticality may affect consumers’ motivations to perform product price assessments, and the motivational regulatory focus of the individual may have features that contribute to restoring motivation. This study aims to analyze the influence of the verticality metaphor, and of the regulatory focus on price assessments in or...
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... A full-entry theory would posit that understanding of visual morphemes involves the retrieval of specific stored meanings from memory, with little interaction from the stems themselves (Feng & O'Halloran, 2012;Ojha, 2013). In other words, placing squiggly lines above a head should evoke the meaning of anger (Fig. 1a), regardless of the facial expression of the stem. ...
... If dynamic construal alone guides comprehension, it implies that all combinations are somehow construable, and none are truly incongruous. Such an extreme view has not been supported by experimentation where participants both explicitly and implicitly recognize some visual morphological combinations as more felicitous and meaningful than others Cohn & Maher, 2015;Ojha, 2013). Nevertheless, emergent meanings do arise from unconventional combinations between visual affixes and stems, implying that some construal process is at work . ...
... A persistent finding in our experiments was the advantage of conventional dyads compared with all other types. In line with the expectations of a full-entry theory (Feng & O'Halloran, 2012;Kennedy, 1982;McCloud, 1993;Ojha, 2013;Walker, 1980), the findings that conventional dyads remain comprehended better in all contexts shows that they are stored in memory. In addition, the correlations with conventionality scores further emphasize that the degree of entrenchment matters for processing. ...
Compositionality is a primary feature of language, but graphics can also create combinatorial meaning, like with items above faces (e.g., lightbulbs to mean inspiration). We posit that these “upfixes” (i.e., upwards affixes) involve a productive schema enabling both stored and novel face–upfix dyads. In two experiments, participants viewed either conventional (e.g., lightbulb) or unconventional (e.g., clover-leaves) upfixes with faces which either matched (e.g., lightbulb/smile) or mismatched (e.g., lightbulb/frown). In Experiment 1, matching dyads sponsored higher comprehensibility ratings and faster response times, modulated by conventionality. In Experiment 2, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) revealed conventional upfixes, regardless of matching, evoked larger N250s, indicating perceptual expertise, but mismatching and unconventional dyads elicited larger semantic processing costs (N400) than conventional-matching dyads. Yet mismatches evoked a late negativity, suggesting congruent novel dyads remained construable compared with violations. These results support that combinatorial graphics involve a constrained productive schema, similar to the lexicon of language.
... Research has also investigated more compositional aspects of visual morphology, such as the constraints on upfixes ( Ojha 2013;Newton 1985). This work has shown that upfixes need to be above a head, not beside it, and the upfix must "agree" with the facial expression ( ). ...
Just as structured mappings between phonology and meaning make up the lexicons of spoken languages, structured mappings between graphics and meaning comprise lexical items in visual languages. Such representations may also involve combinatorial meanings that arise from affixing, substituting, or reduplicating bound and self-standing visual morphemes. For example, hearts may float above a head or substitute for eyes to show a person in love, or gears may spin above a head to convey that they are thinking. Here, we explore the ways that such combinatorial morphology operates in visual languages by focusing on the balance of intrinsic and distributional construction of meaning, the variation in semantic reference and productivity, and the empirical work investigating their cross-cultural variation, processing, and acquisition. Altogether, this work draws parallels between the visual and verbal domains that can hopefully inspire future work on visual languages within the linguistic sciences.
... We might think of this as an item-based "lexical" theory, whereby the upfix results in the retrieval of a specific stored meaning. In one study, Ojha (2013) asked participants to interpret four different types of upfixes (spirals, spikey lines, twirls, and sweat drops) placed above faces showing neutral expressions. When choosing amongst a list of possible interpretations for their expected meanings (anger, surprise, confusion, and agitation), participants identified a variety of emotions, but most frequently chose the same two meanings (surprise: mean = ∼38%, confusion: mean = ∼38%) regardless of the specific upfix. ...
... Mismatches between faces and conventional upfixes, which are stored in memory, should thus have a larger impact than between unconventional pairs. This principled relationship between face and upfix may explain the variety of interpretations found in Ojha's (2013) studies. Since those experiments used neutral faces, the upfixes had no specific "bound" relationship to their accompanying facial expressions. ...
... A stronger item-based view might also posit that mismatches would not be worse than matches, since the upfix alone carries a specific meaning regardless of facial expression (e.g. Ojha, 2013). ...
“Upfixes” are “visual morphemes” originating in comics where an element floats above a character’s head (ex. lightbulbs or gears). We posited that, similar to constructional lexical schemas in language, upfixes use an abstract schema stored in memory, which constrains upfixes to locations above the head and requires them to “agree” with their accompanying facial expressions. We asked participants to rate and interpret both conventional and unconventional upfixes that either matched or mismatched their facial expression (Experiment 1) and/or were placed either above or beside the head (Experiment 2). Interpretations and ratings of conventionality and face–upfix matching (Experiment 1) along with overall comprehensibility (Experiment 2) suggested that both constraints operated on upfix understanding. Because these constraints modulated both conventional and unconventional upfixes, these findings support that an abstract schema stored in long-term memory allows for generalisations beyond memorised individual items.
Medical metaphors are metaphors from the domain of health and disease. They aim to compare complex concepts related to human health with concepts that are familiar to people and who have previous experiences with them. They can be conveyed by many types of visual metaphors: pictorial simile, hybrid, contextual, and integrated. It can also appear in different modalities, such as monomodal, multimodal, or a borderline case. The present study aims to analyze the medical metaphor in health advertisements using a cognitive linguistic approach. It also aims to show which type of visual metaphors is used to convey medical metaphors. It is hypothesized that the monomodal metaphor is the most used one. To achieve the aims, the researcher has adopted Forceville's (1996) model of metaphor. The analyzed data consist of 10 medical ads that are downloaded from the Pinterest site. The results show that medical metaphors play an important role in persuading people to adopt medical messages. They also show that the visual part in hand with verbal texts helps to make the message more understood by consumers. Finally, the multimodal metaphor is the most used in ads though it was hypothesized to be the monomodal one.
