Meaning construction in verbomusical environments: Conceptual disintegration and metonymy

In this paper I explore the workings of meaning (re)construction strategies in programmatic musical works, where the music stands for a broader extra-musical narration. The analysis of ten fragments of classical and contemporary music involving text and music reveals that conceptual disintegration in connection to metonymy emerges as a crucial tool for meaning (re)construction in programmatic music. This research presents four major contributions to the field. First, this paper holds for the complementariness of networks of conceptual disintegration and metonymic mappings in order to convincingly account for conceptual disintegration as a product (i.e., the multimodal expression) and as a process (i.e., the conceptual operation). Second, concerning the product, this paper provides a theoretical categorization of conceptual disintegration in terms of the “degree of disintegration” and “degree of subsidiarity” between the represented part and the whole conceptual package. Third, concerning the process, this work claims that metonymy arises as powerful analytical tool because it counts on a higher degree of constraint than blends. A view from Conceptual Metonymy Theory allows us to expand the inventory of possible meaning reconstruction processes in multimodal use: metonymic echoing, metaphtonymy, metonymic cueing, source-in-target metonymies and multiple source-in-target metonymies. Fourth, this paper deals with musical and verbomusical examples, largely unexplored in cognitive-linguistic studies.