Space Image Schema In Multimodal Representation Of Afghan Migrants Living In Pakistan: A Cognitive Linguistics Approach To Multimodal Discourse Analysis

Abstract

Most lately, analysis of non-linguistics modes of meaning construction in discourse has gained a lot of interest among the practitioners of Systemic Functional Grammar (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996; O’'Halloran, 1999; RaveUi, 2000; Thibault, 2000). These researchers working in visual images and their “co-articulation of meaning” have widened the scope of meaning-making by co-deployed non-linguistic resources in the meaning-making process (O’Halloran, 2004, p. 38). The facility provided by the SFL theory helped comprehend multimodal texts and paved the way for meaning-making in a digitized visual world. Even though SFG is a natural framework for CDS and semiotics, it is not only the ‘grammar’, which can be incorporated to expose the internal structure of the discourse. One such model of grammar comes from the domains of Cognitive Linguistics. Some theorists have shown interest in unravelling ideological structures in a given discourse with the help of cognition (O’ Halloran, 2003; Chilton, 2005; Hart, 2010). Even though SFG develops ‘descriptive’ analysis, it nevertheless, lacks interpretation, which is on the other hand provided through cognitive domains (Fairclough, 1995). The interpretation-analysis developed, exposes the effect of ideology transfer, “perspectivised” by the listener/viewer and thus provides psychological grounding for “meaning construction” (Hart, 2014, p.9). The current study while providing a cognitive perspective to the social semiotic model attempts to refine the less clear aspects of SFL’s standard account and helps develop a cognitive framework /instrument for both linguistic and non-linguistic image schema analysis and explores the typology SPACE image schemas in the multimodal representation of Afghan migrants.