Explorando la combinación de lenguaje e imagen: el caso de la metáfora multimodal

The aim of this paper is to present some reflections concerning the multimodal metaphor, which has recently turned into a topic of growing scientific interest. The mono modal metaphor presents itself only as one means of representation (for example, verbal metaphor), while the multimodal metaphor consists of connections among domains belonging to different modes of representation. First of all, the concept of the multimodal metaphor introduced by Forceville (1996, 2008, 2009) and the possible modes of representation are explained. Th e second part of the paper concentrates on the structure and the characteristics of verbo-visual multimodal metaphors, that is, those that come as a result of interaction between linguistic (verbal narration) and iconic (visual narration) elements. Afterwards, the author discusses the newspaper cartoon, in other words, a type of opinion journalism which encodes verbal and visual discourse that intends to provide a critical and/or humorous vision of an aspect of political, social or cultural life. Th e analysis leaves no doubt that the verbo-visual genre, represented by newspaper cartoons, is a great example of the multimodal metaphor. Therefore, the paper presents a detailed description of ten newspaper cartoons taken from the opinion section of the digital version of the El País giving also emphasis to the representation of the source and target domains in terms of metaphorical-metonymical interaction.