This study examines the visual representation of diegetic time in visual narrative stories, and explores why the invisible diegetic time flow could be expressed through visible elements, and how patterns and textures could be used to specify states of happenings. The study demonstrates that metaphorical relations between time and space are visually realized in visual narratives, leading to the representation of diegetic time and its related concepts on different levels of two-dimensional space. The segmentation of page space and the visual (...) components within panel space are employed to build a diegetic timeline as well as specify temporal aspects of actions and states in visual narrative stories. Neuroscientific evidence which suggests that a common metric is used to compute magnitudes of time and space in the human brain might help explain why time as an abstract concept could undergo visual materialization in visual narratives. (shrink)

Would metaphors used in the context of psychotherapy by people who experience various forms of anxiety disorders differ from those used by people who experience stress? We investigated this question with the help of the Motivation & Sedimentation Model (MSM), a theory of meaning-making developed within the synthetic new discipline of cognitive semiotics. The analysis of a sample of ten transcripts of psychotherapy sessions concerning the topic of anxiety, and a comparable sample concerning stress, showed a significantly stronger proportion of (...) conventionalized metaphors in the stress sample, and a marginally significant difference in the number of innovative metaphors in the anxiety sample. These results suggest that lived experience of an anxiety disorder or another form of maladaptive anxiety affects metaphorical meaning-making, and manifests itself in spontaneous metaphor use. Furthermore, as a result of the conceptual and the empirical investigations of the topic, we propose novel theoretical and operational definitions of the notion of metaphoricity. (shrink)