Metaphor as a Device for Seeing: Exploring Meaning-Making in Audio Description and Phraseological Pedagogy

Elena Isakova

doi:10.53941/sala.2026.100017

Abstract

This conceptual article explores metaphor as a cognitive and semiotic mechanism underlying meaning construction across two seemingly distinct domains: audio description of picturebooks and metaphor-based visualization in foreign language teaching. Both fields are united by a common epistemological concern—how meaning becomes accessible when it is not directly available through either visual perception or compositional linguistic analysis. The article addresses two questions: (1) What cognitive mechanism is shared by the verbalization of visual in audio description and the visualization of verbal in idiom pedagogy? and (2) How can these practices be understood within a common framework of multimodal meaning-making? In this article metaphor is approached not as a decorative linguistic device but as a fundamental “device for seeing”, enabling the transition from perceptual input to conceptual understanding. In the case of picturebooks, where visual and verbal modes interact in a co-dependent structure, audio description raises the problem of transforming visual meaning into verbal form while preserving interpretative openness. In foreign language pedagogy, idiomatic expressions often resist literal interpretation, requiring alternative strategies for meaning activation through conceptual metaphor and visual support. Drawing on examples from the bilateral research project on metaphor-based idiom visualization and illustrative cases from picturebook audio description, the article argues that both practices rely on the same underlying mechanism: guided cross-modal inference, whereby a mediator selects and organizes cues in one modality to facilitate the construction of meaning that is implicit or inaccessible in another. From this perspective, visualizing the verbal and verbalizing the visual are complementary forms of multimodal mediation. The article proposes a conceptual framework that positions metaphor as a central mechanism of multimodal meaning-making in both accessibility practices and foreign language pedagogy.

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