The Creative Power of Love. Multimodal Metaphors in Hungarian Folklore

The creation and comprehension of folk poetry relies heavily on conceptual operations such as conceptual metaphors and metonymies, as demonstrated by a few studies in the disciplines of cognitive and cultural linguistics (e.g., Szelid, 2007; Baranyiné Kóczy, 2018). Based on the theoretical principle of cognitive linguistics that metaphor is not a figure of speech but a conceptual device (see Lakoff and Johnson, 1980), the non-linguistic modalities of folklore are also a noteworthy area for metaphor research, even though they have received relatively little scholarly attention so far (e.g., Szelid 2019, 2020). Within this theoretical framework, two main questions emerge: (1) to what extent can the different details and circumstances of folkloric artworks such as the melody, rhythm, and performance of folk songs, and the shape and patterns of artifacts contribute to their figurative interpretation, and (2) what aspects of the communicated abstract concepts are highlighted and downplayed by the different modalities. The present study aims to shed light on these queries by presenting two case studies on the metaphorical conceptualization reflected in a variety of modalities of Hungarian folk art. The first case study examines the different modalities of a folk song, including  language, rhythm, melody, and ‘time of performance’, while the second case study analyzes the metaphors illustrated by the shapes, patterns, and functions of a piece of furniture known as a ‘bunned chair’. The main argument of the paper is that the complex and coherent worldview reflected in folklore is articulated by the dynamic interplay of the various expressional modes of its works of art. The study proposes a linkage between the linguistic, sonic, visual, and tactile metaphorical and cultural spheres.