Idiom comprehension aided by visuals

The role of conceptual representations

Abstract

This study comprises a theoretical articulation between idiom comprehension, from the compositional perspective by Glucksberg (1993), Cacciari and Levorato (1998), Vega- Moreno (2003), Gibbs and Colston (2007), among others, and the conceptual representations of the Grammar of Visual Design by Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006), namely, the classificational, symbolic and analytical processes. An examination of multimodal texts, such as cartoons, comics and advertisements, was carried out based on a pragmatic standpoint and the notion of context indicated by Koch and Travaglia (2015) and Koch (2016). The analysis revealed that conceptual representations, seen from the characters’ arrangement in the frames, the sociocultural values fostered by the symbolic attributes, the mobilization of prior knowledge, and the perception of textual referent, to name a few, play a crucial role as a strategy for comprehending idioms. This paper aims to expand the scope of investigations on idioms to the analysis of multimodal texts. In a pedagogical level, it also aims to instruct investigations on teaching materials in foreign and mother languages as well as to help language teachers tackle idioms in more contextualized ways in their classrooms.