What is it about?

After Lakoff and Johnson's trailblazing Metaphors We Live By (1980) it is generally accepted that metaphor is primarily a matter of thinking, experiencing, and doing, and only secondarily a matter of language. Unsurprisingly, the past decades have seen an ever-growing body of work that focuses on metaphor (1) that is non-verbal (e.g. visual, or musical) -- which thereby is mononomodal in drawing on a single mode; (2) that straddles two or more modes (e.g. visual+written language or visual+sonic or spoken language+gesture) -- which thereby is multimodal in drawing on two or more modes. This encyclopedic entry briefly summarizes the main issues pertaining to analyzing multimodal metaphors of the visual+ written/spoken language and the gesture+spoken language varieties.

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Why is it important?

Communication is less and less monomodally verbal -- if it ever really was. Since metaphor is arguably the most important trope in rhetoric, understanding how multimodal metaphors work, both from a maker's and an audience's perspective, is crucial in communication studies.

Perspectives

A drawback of the immense popularity of Metaphors We Live By is that many younger scholars think that ALL metaphors are orientational or structural ones, and thereby reveal how human thought is governed by the same patterns over and over again. However, not all metaphors are orientational or structural. Indeed, many of them are creative one-offs. Max Black's (1962, 1979) work on creative, "interaction" metaphor has for too long been forgotten. Analysts of metaphor (in whatever mode or modes) need to understand both what structural and creative metaphor have in common and in what respects they differ -- and thus need to (re)read Black.

Dr Charles Forceville
Universiteit van Amsterdam

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This page is a summary of: Multimodal Metaphor, December 2025, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0829.pub2.
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