Audio-visual metaphors of the financial crisis: meaning making and the flow of experience

• Main Authors: Cornelia Müller, Christina Schmitt
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
• Series: Revista Brasileira de Linguística Aplicada
• Subjects: audio-visual metaphor; cinematic expressive movement; dynamics of metaphor; meaning making; metaphor and experience; metaphoric theme; emergence of metaphor
• Online Access: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1984-63982015000200311&lng=en&tlng=en

This paper advocates a perspective on metaphors in audio-visual media that conceives of these as processes of meaning making, i.e., as dynamic embodied conceptualizations, constitutively bound to the flow of experience. This involves experience in a double sense: as immediate affection through an audio-visually orchestrated form of movement experience and as sensory-motor experiences of metaphoric source domains. Drawing on an interdisciplinary (linguistic and film analysis) method, this study presents an analysis of a German political TV report on winners and losers of the financial crisis. The goal of this case study is twofold: to reconstruct the complexity of metaphoric meaning making in audio-visual media and to illustrate a theoretical claim: that metaphors in audio-visual compositions emerge dynamically from sensory and affective experiences.