Paper short abstract:

The paper extends my theory of "multi-level grounding", which constrains the process of emergence of meaning based on conceptual blending, to three new multimodal phenomena relating language, music and visual imagery: "embodied synchronization", "fictive interaction", and "phatic communication".

Paper long abstract:

My fledgling theory of "multi-level grounding" views semiosis resulting from conceptual blending as neither indeterministic, stemming from endless cycles of cross-space mappings, nor rooted in firm ontologies, such as information inherent to material anchors. Rather, the meaningful potential of multimodal content is simultaneously "attracted" by a hierarchy of "grounding boxes", levels of constraint ranging from embodied to social factors, providing contextual motivation for the generation of meaning, yet allowing astounding creativity in individual semantic interpretations. Layers identified so far, e.g. from actual descriptions of a Wagner piece in an experiment, are physiological ("tense music"), image schematic ("forces clashing"), connotational ("dramatic sentiments"), conceptual ("a battle at sea"), elaborated cultural ("sounds like gods coming down from Olympus") and individual ("reminds me of elementary school"). I here extend the system to three new phenomena of potential interest to anthropologists, integrating language, music and visual cognition. The first, "embodied synchronization" discusses emergent effects of rhythmic alignment, as in the compositional technique of "Mickey-Mousing", where the music mimics the movement of characters on the screen to produce meaningful events. The second, "fictive interaction" explores how music and visual imagery produce semiosis in instances in which a character "replicates" on the screen and starts interacting with the doppelganger ("identity projection" in CBT, e.g. Spock meeting Spock in Star Trek [2009]). The third explores musico-visual analogues of linguistic "phatic communication", social bonding without overt referential content, as in the invocation of the force theme in Star Wars whenever the characters jointly embrace "the light side".