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Excited for this keynote with the awesome Barbara Dancygier on viewpoint and multimodality #HDLS14
Dancygier asks how meaning is constructed multimodally--constructions, metonymy, image schemas, etc.--but at the same time, there's a need for a concept to bring all these concepts together, and viewpoint is perhaps that. Barbara shouts out future work with @alnellus #HDLS14
Dancygier clarifies: viewpoint doesn't need to be "someone's" viewpoint; she broadens viewpoint to understand it as a way to analyze conceptual alignment--which is necessary for being able to connect various non-visual phenomena (emotion, stance, etc.) in a larger network #HDLS14
Dancygier starts where one expects: viewpointed/ free indirect discourse. Sure. But what happens when we extend ideas of viewpoint to memes? They look like direct speech but who's the author? Memes work through ironic viewpoint phenomena (a la @vrtbn and @Subcontrarian) #HDLS14
I love this example of understanding viewpoint phenomena as underlying definite and indefinite article usage. We see unfocused/indefinitely marked events collecting in a discourse sequence and then a zooming-in with the demonstrative "that" for rhetorical purpose #HDLS14
We see strong viewpoints (with some reduction of the sculpture to human scale) in street art, too. Dancygier moves through several examples of street art that show how viewpoint shifting reframes/undoes the scene for emotive effect. There's a network of viewpoints here. #HDLS14
So, to unpack, there is the statue of the orcas (oversized), there's the plastic rings (oversized even larger). You blend these together by rescaling to get another viewpoint. It has an emotive and political viewpoint of the artist that come with experience of blending. #HDLS14
Lady Justice is being silenced/oppressed and being sexually assaulted by a political party in the US, but then we see it parroted in Poland, and the metonymies here works. We have the viewpoint of the politicians, sure, but the metonymic frame activated is not theirs. #HDLS14
Dancygier points out that, while some folks like @JeannetteL16 have been working on metonymy, there should be much more attention to it because it does a lot of work. (My PhD work was on emotional appeals and metonymy, I'll point out 
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Dancygier is absolutely right that this "look it's melting" metonymy of ice cream worlds doesn't work. (It's not emotive, for one, because melting ice cream isn't so strong.) She points out that the viewpoint here takes us out of the planet, as if we are not responsible. #HDLS14
And these save the planet images almost always are ineffective. It's almost as if they are intentionally trying to not pay attention to frame allocation, metonymy, viewpoint, or anything that makes these blends work. Linguists can (need to?) help here. #HDLS14
Really excellent diagram that analyzes the "one does not simply" meme template (which I'll point out is also analyzed in her work with @alnellus's work on memes as constructions) and viewpoint embedding. Putting this here for unpacking later. #HDLS14
Good Girl Gina, Scumbag Steve, and Good Guy Greg are metonymized stock figures used to vent--you (or people use) these memes as both constructing categories of good and bad behavior and expressing categories. You get sorts of form/meaning pairs with built in viewpoints #HDLS14
I thought Dancygier would start by talking about this meme, but it's actually how she ends! From body posture, eye gaze, facial expression, we get an entrenched/ stock story, much like the caused motion construction. [Old interest to new interest] is encoded in the meme. #HDLS14
![I thought Dancygier would start by talking about this meme, but it's actually how she ends! From body posture, eye gaze, facial expression, we get an entrenched/ stock story, much like the caused motion construction. [Old interest to new interest] is encoded in the meme. #HDLS14](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EnS2EQAVoAA6p--.jpg "I thought Dancygier would start by talking about this meme, but it's actually how she ends! From body posture, eye gaze, facial expression, we get an entrenched/ stock story, much like the caused motion construction. [Old interest to new interest] is encoded in the meme. #HDLS14")
To conclude, there are two multimodalities at work in all these examples: we see visual forms working like linguistic forms, providing structure to be followed; but they are also used in economies of usage. And they also bring embodiment, language, and viewpoint together. #HDLS14
We could start by looking at the role of embodied aspects, the frame evocations of metonymies, blending across frames, the various sorts of mapping, etc., but, as Dancygier argues, viewpoint too can be used to organize all of this phenomena coherently. #HDLS14
