An Embodied View of Physical Signs in News Cartoons

• 作者: Xiaoping Wang
• 来源期刊: 语言与符号学研究
• 学科: 文学
• 年，卷（期）: 2017,（4）
• 页码范围: 32-54
• 页数: 23页
• 分类号: H05

摘要

The centric position of the body in cognition has long been the paradigm for theories of embodiment; its research, however, has two limitations: 1) many studies have primarily worked on a specific, single dimension of the body, lacking a dynamic and comprehensive perspective; 2) the multimodal nature of embodied cognition has been tremendously underestimated, particularly in terms of the multimodal representation of physical signs. In view of the above two problems, the present research, with news cartoons as its research objects, takes a multi-layered perspective to view the semiosis of physical signs, for the role of the 'body'amid the semiotization process might differ on different layers of representation. The author argues that: 1) on the formal layer, physical signs, which depend on perceptual senses, are realized by virtue of embodied simulation, which can help divert interpreters’ attention from the form to the cognitive content; 2) on the conceptual layer, the semiotization of physical signs can be considered as a modularization process, absorbing modules from different sources and then being integrated as a whole, which can be explained by metonymy and multimodal metaphor theory; 3) on the contextual layer, the referent of the 'body' is believed to be gradually replaced by its contextual symbolic meaning, which, by nature, arises from the reinterpretation of physical signs in specific cognitive situations.