Introduction to the special section on figurative multimodality

Introduction to the special section on figurative multimodality: The call for papers clearly explains how, at the time of its inception, Cognitive Linguistics (CL) was seen as being principally about conceptual metaphors, and additionally about metonymies and image schemas. However, the rapid evolution and diversification of CL revealed topics and methodologies that emerged through the widespread investigations. Gradually, conceptual metaphors and metonymies became less central, although years of multidisciplinary research on how conceptual metaphors and metonymies interact, on the neural base for these embodied cognitive mechanisms, and how they may be understood to motivate grammatical structures, have brought the construal operations to core research. Contributions have emerged from various theoretical and applied perspectives, including specifically cognitive linguistics and the relation with cognitive science, neurosciences, and the philosophy of the mind. Furthering this line of study has called for analyses of methodologies, with the necessary experimental protocols involved in cross-linguistic comparisons, both synchronic and diachronic analyses, corpus studies of language use, and in translation practices. To use the words employed in the con- ference: topics of research have included the impact of figuration on levels of lin- guistic analysis (morphology, lexis, semantics, pragmatics), on areas of grammar, on various types of discourse (e.g., art, music, economics, law, medicine, philosophy, politics, psychology, and psychotherapy), as well as figurative multimodality and the relationship between language and emotions, language and humour, irony, sarcasm, euphemism, etc. ... To conclude, this collection of articles discusses how manifestation of the uni- versal cognitive mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy are exemplified through gestalt operations of comparison, and similarity, of figure and ground alignment, and image schemas. The conceptualization of music and pitch space, of sight/color and taste constructions, of multimodal blends in graphic novels, of associations of visual words in binary oppositions, and of light representation in painting depends on aspects of our environment, revealed through prototypes that range between human embodied and specific cultural referents.