Elsevier

Journal of Pragmatics

Volume 70, September 2014, Pages 130-151
Journal of Pragmatics

Meaning construction in verbomusical environments: Conceptual disintegration and metonymy

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2014.06.008 Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Ten examples of classical and contemporary programmatic music are analyzed.

  • Disintegration and metonymy are crucial for meaning construction in music.

  • A new paradigm to study disintegration networks is proposed.

  • The analysis shows complex patterns of interaction involving metonymy.

  • This work brings to attention the necessity to explore metonymy in non-verbal modes.

Abstract

In this paper I explore the workings of meaning (re)construction strategies in programmatic musical works, where the music stands for a broader extra-musical narration. The analysis of ten fragments of classical and contemporary music involving text and music reveals that conceptual disintegration in connection to metonymy emerges as a crucial tool for meaning (re)construction in programmatic music. This research presents four major contributions to the field. First, this paper holds for the complementariness of networks of conceptual disintegration and metonymic mappings in order to convincingly account for conceptual disintegration as a product (i.e., the multimodal expression) and as a process (i.e., the conceptual operation). Second, concerning the product, this paper provides a theoretical categorization of conceptual disintegration in terms of the “degree of disintegration” and “degree of subsidiarity” between the represented part and the whole conceptual package. Third, concerning the process, this work claims that metonymy arises as powerful analytical tool because it counts on a higher degree of constraint than blends. A view from Conceptual Metonymy Theory allows us to expand the inventory of possible meaning reconstruction processes in multimodal use: metonymic echoing, metaphtonymy, metonymic cueing, source-in-target metonymies and multiple source-in-target metonymies. Fourth, this paper deals with musical and verbomusical examples, largely unexplored in cognitive-linguistic studies.

Introduction

This paper aims at delving deeper into the different levels of multimodal meaning rendered in verbo-musical environments. More specifically, it focuses on a particular strategy of musical meaning (re)construction,1 i.e., the way in which different patterns of conceptual disintegration that structure the multimodal expression trigger the activation of metonymic reasoning at the conceptual level, in ten examples of program classical and contemporary music involving music and text. Program or programmatic music refers to a type of art music that attempts to render an extra-musical narrative. While the vast majority of music scholars readily acknowledge the existence of programmatic pieces, the idea of reconstructing a composer's intention per se is actually somewhat controversial2 (cf.; Barthes, 1965, Bloom, 1973, Wimsatt, 1954). The interpretation of the message that program music aims to convey is always dependent on the inferential capabilities of the speakers to a higher or lower extent. In this paper, we contend that this process of meaning reconstruction is aided by the combined workings of conceptual disintegration and metonymy. As shall be argued, these theoretical constructs guide and constrain the meaning reconstruction process, so that the inferential load is largely reduced, the cognitive cost lessened, and the intended message more straightforwardly recovered.

In this paper, conceptual disintegration relates to a selective projection of a multimodal manifestation, whereas metonymy refers to the cognitive process based on granting access from a subdomain (in this case, the partially represented multimodal representation) to a larger and more-encompassing matrix domain. Disintegration and metonymy emerge as crucial tools for meaning (re)construction in programmatic musical works, where the music evokes a broader extra-musical narration.

Disintegration as a tool for meaning (re)construction has not received very much scholar attention. Although Fauconnier and Turner (2002:119) have acknowledged its concomitancy to conceptual integration,3 nothing has been published in this regard since Hougaard's (2005) and Bache (2005) interesting insights in Journal of Pragmatics. Framed within Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT; Fauconnier and Turner, 2002), Hougaard (2002:3) defines disintegration as “a process by which one unified and discrete structural element in mental space gets to receive multiple counterpart relations and is projected to (an)other mental space(s) as two, or more, separate structural elements”. Notwithstanding the attention that CBT has drawn to the issue of conceptual disintegration, the paradigm cannot sufficiently account for the whole phenomenon of meaning (re)construction. Among other shortages (for a critical review of CBT, see Gibbs, 2000, Ritchie, 2004, Ruiz de Mendoza, 1998), the conceptual blend cannot provide us with a convincing separation between disintegration as a product (the linguistic or multimodal expression) and as a process (i.e., the conceptual operation). As Gibbs emphasizes (2000:531), “the processes of linguistic understanding are different from the products we consciously think about when we read or hear verbal expressions” (let “linguistic” and “verbal” stand for “multimodal” for the purposes of this paper). In order to comply with this theoretical distinction, this research delves deeper into the nature and scope of conceptual disintegration and offers an analysis that differs from that of Hougaard (2005) and Bache (2005) in at least four ways.

First, it holds for the complementariness of networks of conceptual disintegration and metonymic mappings in order to convincingly account for disintegration as a product (the linguistic or multimodal expression) and as a process (i.e., the conceptual operation). Meaning (re)construction is here understood as a two-step process: the first involves the configuration of certain cues to structure the multimodal manifestation (product), and the second relates to the cognitive operations triggered at the conceptual level by those multimodal cues (process).

Second, as regards the partial representation of a multimodal expression, or product, this paper provides a theoretical categorization in terms of the “degree of disintegration” (which yields a distinction between substitution and fragmentation) and “kind of subsidiarity” between the represented part and the whole conceptual package (on the basis of inherent dependency or ad hoc dependency). This two-variable taxonomy, here labeled as the Multimodal Conceptual Integration Model (MCIM, Pérez-Sobrino, 2014), goes a step further than CBT in offering at least two criteria to distinguish different types of disintegrated conceptual networks and the principles motivating them.

Third, concerning disintegration as a process, this work claims that metonymy arises as a powerful analytical tool in connection to conceptual disintegration because it counts on a higher degree of constraint than blends and it features a greater interactional dimension. As will be shown, the patterns of interaction between metonymies propounded in Ruiz de Mendoza (2000), i.e., metonymic expansion and metonymic reduction, can account in finer grain for all the inferential activity arising from Hougaard's (2005) conceptual disintegration processes, i.e., splitting and partitioning selection. Furthermore, a view from Conceptual Metonymy Theory (henceforth, CMyT) allows us to expand the inventory of possible meaning reconstruction processes: evidence is shown to prove the productive working of multimodal metonymic echoing, multimodal metaphtonymy, multimodal metonymic cueing, multimodal source-in-target metonymy and multimodal multiple-source-in target metonymies as additional means to reconstruct absent information. This proposal proves also favorable to the issue of predicting the cognitive impact of conceptual disintegration, since the scope of possible inferences arising from a metonymic mapping is much more narrowed down than that of blends.

The fourth novelty of this paper resides in the corpus of study. Traditionally, research in CBT and CMyT has offered linguistic evidence to support their claims on the conceptual working of everyday thought. However, further evidence in non-verbal modes is necessary for a theory about thought to be exhaustive. In this regard, musical understanding remains a complex and largely unexplored issue in Cognitive Linguistics (CL). Only musical metaphor has drawn scholarly attention (Brower, 2000, Cook, 1992, Cox, 2011, Forceville, 2009a, Larson, 2012, Larson and Johnson, 2004, Pérez-Sobrino, 2014, Spitzer, 2008, Zbikowski, 2002). In compliance with this theoretical necessity, this work provides evidence of the productive workings of musical metonymy in a selected bulk of multimodal examples including text and music. As will be shown, the interaction of metonymy with other cognitive operations guides and steers the conceptualization of certain musical elements as a person, a person in motion or even an event.

The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. In section 2, I address some basic theoretical notions that will ground the subsequent analysis. I deal with the concept of conceptual disintegration (2.1) which, for the purposes of this paper, is subdivided in cases of substitution and fragmentation. I briefly introduce some basic notions of metonymy (2.2) and sketch the basic workings of meaning reconstruction operations (2.3), in which patterns of disintegration creatively combine with metonymy. In section 3 I turn to analyze several patterns of disintegration in combination with metonymy (which I illustrate with ten examples of classical and contemporary music with text). I retrieve the main proposals of this paper in section 4, and suggest further lines of potential research.

Section snippets

Conceptual disintegration

Conceptual disintegration has been traditionally associated to selective projection in CBT studies4

Multimodal meaning reconstruction strategies: towards the construction of an inventory

Although there is yet no published research work on verboaudial metonymies, there is some preliminary literature on verbopictorial metonymies (cf. Forceville, 2009b, Hidalgo and Kraljevic, 2011, Uriós-Aparisi, 2009) and verboaudial metaphor (Author, 2014; Forceville, 2009a, Zbikowski, 2002). This kind of research supports the productivity of the application of tools for analyzing verbal communication to multimodal environments. This working assumption has been labeled equipollence hypothesis in

Conclusions

The study of examples of program music reveals that the process of meaning (re)construction can be reduced to a finite set of patterns of conceptual integration and conceptual interaction. The major claim of this paper is that meaning (re)construction is a two-step process where the specific set of conceptual integration patterns structuring the multimodal manifestation triggers an array of cognitive operations at the conceptual level necessary for the inferential task to take place. In

Acknowledgements

I am deeply indebted to Lorena Pérez Hernández and an anonymous reviewer for their insightful critical remarks, which have notably helped me to improve this manuscript at different stages. The responsibility for any remaining mistakes is solely mine. This research has been carried out with the support of a FPU grant AP2010-5172 (Spanish Ministry of Education). I am also grateful to Nokia Corporation for granting permission to reproduce their tune and logo.

Paula Pérez-Sobrino is currently a PhD student at the University of La Rioja (Spain), where she is about to finish her doctoral thesis with the support of and FPU scholarship (Ministry of Education, Spain). Her main field of interest is multimodal metaphor across different genres, such as printed advertising, commercials, music and cinema. She is also concerned with the study of Conceptual Theory of Metonymy and other cognitive operations involving text, music and sound.

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  • Paula Pérez-Sobrino is currently a PhD student at the University of La Rioja (Spain), where she is about to finish her doctoral thesis with the support of and FPU scholarship (Ministry of Education, Spain). Her main field of interest is multimodal metaphor across different genres, such as printed advertising, commercials, music and cinema. She is also concerned with the study of Conceptual Theory of Metonymy and other cognitive operations involving text, music and sound.

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