This article extends the author’s theory of multilevel grounding in meaning generation from its original application to music to the domains of visual cognition and poetry. Based on the notions of ground from the philosophy of language and conceptual blending from cognitive linguistics, the approach views semiosis in works of art as a series of successive mappings couched in a set of six hierarchical, recursive levels of constraint or grounding boxes: (1) perceptual, parsing the stimulus into formal gestalten; (2) cross-modal, motivating schematic correspondences between the stimulus so structured and the listener’s embodied experience; (3) affective, ascribing to this embodied appreciation dynamic sensations, as in the distinction between tense and lax parts of the perceptual flow; (4) conceptual, drawing analogies between such schematic and affective appreciation and elementary experiential imagery, resulting in outlines of narratives; (5) culturally rich, checking such a narrative outline against the recipient’s cultural knowledge; and (6) individual, adding to the levels above idiosyncratic recollections from the participant’s personal experience. The goal of the analysis is to show that the interpretation of constructs from different semiotic modes (music, vision and language) may rely on the same grounding levels as it ultimately depends on the same perceptual, embodied and contextual circumstances. Specifically, the article uses the system to analyse the possible reception of a section from the romance for violin and orchestra ‘The Lark Ascending’ by Ralph Vaughan Williams, the painting ‘The Last Supper’ by Leonardo da Vinci and the poem ‘No Man Is an Island’ by John Donne.

本文将作者的意义产生的多层次基础理论从最初的应用扩展到音乐，再扩展到视觉认知和诗歌领域。基于语言哲学的地面概念和认知语言学的概念融合，该方法将艺术品中的符号学视为一系列连续的映射，这些映射包含在六个层次的递归级别约束或基础框内：（1 ）感性的，将刺激分解为正式的gestalten；（2）如此构成的刺激与听众的体验之间的交叉模式，激励性的示意性对应关系；（3）情感，因为这种体现的欣赏动感，如知觉流的紧张和放松部分之间的区别；（4）在概念上，情感上的欣赏与基本的体验意象之间的概念上，绘画上的类比，从而形成叙述的轮廓；（5）具有丰富的文化背景，根据接收者的文化知识检查叙事大纲；和（6）个人，将参与者的个人经历添加到特质回忆之上。分析的目的是表明，对来自不同符号模式（音乐，视觉和语言）的构造的解释可能依赖于相同的基础层次，因为它最终取决于相同的感知，体现和上下文环境。具体来说，本文使用该系统分析了拉尔夫·沃恩·威廉姆斯（Ralph Vaughan Williams）的小提琴和管弦乐队《云雀升腾》的浪漫情节，莱昂纳多·达·芬奇（Leonardo da Vinci）的绘画《最后的晚餐》和诗词《无人是》的可能接受部分约翰·多恩（John Donne）的《一个岛屿》。