The following is a pre-print version of a paper that has been published as: Górska, Elżbieta. 2018. “A multimodal portrait of WISDOM and STUPIDITY. A case study of image-schematic metaphors in cartoons”. In Rafał Augustyn and Agnieszka Mierzwińska-Hajnos (eds.). New Insights into the Language and Cognition Interface. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 98-117. If you want to quote from it verbatim, please check the published version (EG, Decmember 2018). _______________________________________________________________________________________________ A MULTIMODAL PORTRAIT OF WISDOM AND STUPIDITY. A CASE STUDY OF IMAGE-SCHEMATIC METAPHORS IN CARTOONS ELŻBIETA GÓRSKA Introduction Spatialization of abstract ideas is one of the dominant research questions in studies of conceptual metaphor in cognitive linguistics. This issue has been commonly addressed on the basis of linguistic data alone (see, e.g., Lakoff 1993; Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999; Kövecses 2000). In this article, however, I will join the tren d characteristic of research on co-speech gesture (see, e.g., Cienki 1998b, 2005, 2013; Müller 2008a,b, Calbris 2008; Mittelberg 2010), film (e.g. Forceville 2006, 2013), and music (e.g. Zbikowski 2009, Górska 2010, 2014) and take a multimodal perspective on this issue. Specifically, I will focus on spatialization of various aspects of the concepts of WISDOM and STUPIDITY in cartoons by means of image schematic metaphors, i.e. metaphors that evoke an image schema or an image schema complex as their source domain and whose function is to highlight some aspect or aspects of these two abstract concepts. Image schemas (Johnson 1987, Lakoff 1987), let us recall, are prelinguistic patterns of sensory-motor experience which emerge from our bodily interactions with the environment, of which bodily movement through space, perceptual interactions, and manipulation of objects play a crucial role. Being derived from such embodied experiences which are themselves inherently meaningful (in that they have predictable consequences), image schemas have their internal logic which forms grounds for making predictions about objects and events in the physical world. It is important to note also that image schemas may have not only dynamic, but also static realizations. What is crucial for our concern, however, is the fact that, due to their grounding in multisensory experiences, image schemas are "cross-modal", i.e. are able to transfer information between different sensory systems. I will aim to show here that cross-modal activation of image schemas underlies a coherent interpretation of a selection of cartoons by a Polish artist Janusz Kapusta. Or, to be more precise, my purpose is to discuss a number of creative multimodal image schematic metaphors which, taken together build a verbo-visual portrait of WISDOM and STUPIDITY constructed by Janusz Kapusta in his cartoons. The underlying idea which forms the backbone of my discussion goes back to Lakoff's Invariance Hypothesis saying that metaphorical mappings preserve the image-schema structure of the source domain, from which it follows that "a great many, if not all, abstract inferences are actually metaphorical versions of spatial inferences that are inherent in the topological structure of image schemas" (Lakoff 1990: 54). It is thus expected that inferencing about the abstract concepts of "wisdom" and "stupidity" will be a multimodal metaphorical version of spatial inferencing inherent in the image schematic structuring of a particular source domain. It needs to be noted also that, following Forceville and Urios-Aparisi, I assume that a defining characteristic of a multimodal metaphor is that its "target and source are rendered exclusively or predominantly in two different modes/modalities" (2009: 4). 1 The selected cartoons were originally published in a Polish weekly "Plus-Minus", yet my data sample (except for one example) comes from a recently published book by Janusz Kapusta (2014) which marked the 10 th anniversary of his weekly collaborations with this magazine. It comprises over 200 cartoons, out of about 500 published during this ten year period. As the book-cover shows, the cartoons have a characteristic structure: