Multilevel grounded semantics across cognitive modalities: Music, vision, poetry

Abstract

This article extends the author’s theory of multilevel grounding in meaning generation from its original application to music to the domains of visual cognition and poetry. Based on the notions of ground from the philosophy of language and conceptual blending from cognitive linguistics, the approach views semiosis in works of art as a series of successive mappings couched in a set of six hierarchical, recursive levels of constraint or grounding boxes: (1) perceptual, parsing the stimulus into formal gestalten; (2) cross-modal, motivating schematic correspondences between the stimulus so structured and the listener’s embodied experience; (3) affective, ascribing to this embodied appreciation dynamic sensations, as in the distinction between tense and lax parts of the perceptual flow; (4) conceptual, drawing analogies between such schematic and affective appreciation and elementary experiential imagery, resulting in outlines of narratives; (5) culturally rich, checking such a narrative outline against the recipient’s cultural knowledge; and (6) individual, adding to the levels above idiosyncratic recollections from the participant’s personal experience. The goal of the analysis is to show that the interpretation of constructs from different semiotic modes (music, vision and language) may rely on the same grounding levels as it ultimately depends on the same perceptual, embodied and contextual circumstances. Specifically, the article uses the system to analyse the possible reception of a section from the romance for violin and orchestra ‘The Lark Ascending’ by Ralph Vaughan Williams, the painting ‘The Last Supper’ by Leonardo da Vinci and the poem ‘No Man Is an Island’ by John Donne.