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Object–speech–object: We use “container metaphors” for situations, when for instance “in” or “out” of love or trouble. The mind or body might be considered a machine, where my thinking or running is considered to be “rusty” or “running out of steam.”³⁶⁰ We might “be in touch” with a person or understanding. We might “grasp” a concept, or it might be “out of reach.”³⁶¹

Body–speech–body: We might “give birth” to a new idea or “point to” the solution for a problem. Illness may be a metaphor, which directs us to the “pain” of experience.³⁶² Eating may be metaphorical: to be “hungry” for experience or “gluttonous” in one’s excess.

Space–speech–body: Things are heading “up” or “down.” Someone is “in the middle” of the action, or “left out.” We “face the future,” “move forward” with an agenda, and “look forward to an outcome.”³⁶³

Metaphor may be by way of metonymy, where a word or phrase can make one thing stand for another non-congruent meaning – “I drank a bottle,” says someone who is reluctant to speak more directly to their drinking or what they drank.³⁶⁴ Or metaphor may be by way of synecdoche, where a part is called upon to mean for a whole – “I’ve got a new set of wheels,” says someone who has just purchased a car.³⁶⁵

But this is more than a matter of words, spoken in these examples as figures of speech. As objects or pictures of them^§AS2a the bottle or the wheels can mean this without the words. These are not merely incongruent uses of words; they are multimodal transpositions. Mindsight is transpositional.^§MS3.1.2b Music is transpositional.^§AS1.4.2a The body and blood of Jesus in the Christian eucharist is a multimodal transposition of one kind or another, depending on one’s religious conviction.^§AS1.1.2a None of these things is merely a metaphor in the sense of words that have incongruent meanings. They are multimodal practices of meaning.

If the idea of metaphor indicates a certain kind of non-literal similarity or symbolic association, we want to say that this is true of all meaning transpositions. Meanings are always the same and forever different, both in transposition and by design.^§MS0.4.1 There is never such a thing as a straightforwardly congruent meaning. And perhaps, as Umberto Eco says, language is itself metaphorical.³⁶⁶

As an antonym for metaphor, “literal” is indeed a strange idea, to assume that some meanings can be more congruent than others. Besides, where does metaphor stop and congruence begin? “To stop” might be considered a transposition from space and body to other kinds of experience.³⁶⁷ But without conscious association in the act of meaning, “stop” has become a new congruence. Or one participant in meaning might make the metaphorical connection, and another not.

For these reasons, congruence is not a practicable concept, as if it can simply be applied to a figure of speech or its multimodal proxy. There is no such thing as literal simply to be contrasted with metaphorical. Metaphors are mappings between domains, says Peter Gärdenfors,³⁶⁸ or in our terminology, multimodal transpositions, resonances across the forms of meaning.

Sometimes, to complicate matters further, these transpositions may involve certain kinds of meaningful displacement – meaning as pointed absence, as avoidance, as concealment of interest, as dissembling, as obfuscation, as hypocrisy.^§2 An error may be said to be a crime, or a crime an error.³⁶⁹ The transpositions may selectively illuminate in order to hide.

These processes of transposition are, moreover, in our very natures. They are in the ontogenesis of every infant as a human meaning-maker. This is how, to use Daniel Stern’s words, “infants bring together separate sounds, movements, touches, sights and feelings,” developing a “sense of self that is a single, distinct, integrated body; an agent of actions, experiencer of feelings, maker of intentions, architect of plans, the transposer of experience into language, the communicator or sharer of personal knowledge.” So, even before learning to speak, an infant has developed “senses of the self … in preverbal forms of agency, physical cohesion, continuity in time, having intentions in mind.”³⁷⁰

In these ways, multimodal transposition figures objects, bodies, spaces, images, and sounds as prostheses for our thinking, prior to the acquisition of speech, and later still in the life of a child, in writing. Text and speech merely extend this process, without changing its basis.

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³⁵⁹ John Durham Peters, 2015, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, p. 101; Zoltán Kövecses, 2002, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

³⁶⁰ George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, 1980 [2003], Metaphors We Live By, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 29, 59, 27.

³⁶¹ Mark Johnson, 2007, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 20, 66.

³⁶² Susan Sontag, 1977, Illness as Metaphor, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Susan Sontag, 2003, Regarding the Pain of Others, London: Hamish Hamilton.

³⁶³ George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, 1980 [2003], Metaphors We Live By, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 24, 43.

³⁶⁴ Umberto Eco, 1984, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p. 114.

³⁶⁵ George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, 1980 [2003], Metaphors We Live By, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, p. 36.

³⁶⁶ Umberto Eco, 1984, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p. 88.

³⁶⁷ Ibid., p. 115.

³⁶⁸ Peter Gärdenfors, 2014, Geometry of Meaning: Semantics Based on Conceptual Spaces, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 40.

³⁶⁹ Umberto Eco, 1984, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p. 103.

³⁷⁰ Daniel L. Stern, 1985, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology, New York: Basic Books, pp. 3–6.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 140–143. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s “Metaphors We Live By” §AS1.4.4a