Topic: Relevance: The Key Principle of All Communication

Speaker: Professor Charles Forceville, Internationally renowned scholar of multimodal metaphors

Time: November 22, 2022, 19:30 to 21:00

Zoom:

Organizer: School of Foreign Studies, Jilin University

Introduction to Speaker:

Dr. Charles Forceville is an associate professor and PhD supervisor with the Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He serves on the advisory boards of internationally recognized SSCI journals such as Metaphor and Symbol, Journal of Pragmatics and Review of Cognitive Linguistics. He has edited/authored five books, including Pictorial Metaphor in Advertising (1996), Multimodal Metaphor (2009), and Visual and Multimodal Communication: Using Association Theory (2020). His main research areas include: pragmatics, multimodal metaphor, visual communication, and discourse analysis.

Introduction to Lecture:

The Relevance Theory asserts that every act of communication assumes optimal relevance to its envisioned audience. However, to date, relevant researchers have only analyzed face-to-face communication between two individuals. This type of communication is primarily linguistically oriented. In order to realize the potential of association theory and develop it into a more inclusive theory of communication, it is necessary to adapt and refine it in two aspects,  to explore the interpretation of association theory for (1) communicative interpretations of modalities other than verbal language, and (2) mass communication. Through discussing examples (e.g., signs, pictograms, print advertisements, and cartoons), this lecture demonstrates how the association theory can be applied more broadly to visual and multimodal communication, and how it can play an important role in mass communication messages involving static visuals.