Conceptual blending and (im)politeness in political cartooning

This paper is meant to give an account of multimodal (im)politeness in political cartoons, drawing primarily on critical discourse studies (CDS) (in particular, Teun van Dijk’s notion of “context models” and Paul Chilton’s concept of “critical discourse moments”), blending theory (Fauconnier and Turner 2002), and speech act theory (especially Geoffrey Leech’s most recent revisions of Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson’s notions of negative and positive face). There is of course an abundant literature on blending theory, but the potential of this theory for analysing face-enhancing or face-threatening multimodal discourse has not been fully realised. It is shown that political cartoons can exemplify not only face attack but also face enhancement, and that blending theory can contribute to the comprehending and critique of sociopolitical action or linguistic and nonlinguistic forms of control that may operate in the world. The article thus demonstrates the value that results from merging critical cognitive linguistics and sociopragmatics.

Valuation Сomponent of Metaphor UP vs. DOWN in German Political Cartoon

In German political cartoon the metaphor UP vs. DOWN introduces oppositions GOOD vs. BAD, MORE vs. LESS, UNREALIZABLE vs. PRACTICABLE. The paper describes their valuation components accenting the positive or negative sign of oppositions and its base in lexicon of the German language personality. Complex nature of cartoons, which are polycode texts, and their appeal to the language personality allow application of cognitive linguistics and methods of traditional linguistics. The paper demonstrates that political cartoons different realizations of this metaphor are visualized by levels: earth surface, above it, and below it. Certain valuation signs are fixed in realizations that gravitate towards the metaphor GOOD IS UP - BAD IS DOWN based on the human idea of levels structure of the world, which is a specific cognitive model reflected in German phraseology, inner form of words, traditional word combinations. Deviation from this model takes place by realization of the opposition UNREALIZABLE IS UP - PRACTICABLE IS DOWN, which is based on everyday pragmatism fixed in German phraseology. In this case the cartoonist creates special supports for the addressee to achieve correct understanding of his message. Distribution of signs in the opposition MORE IS UP - LESS IS DOWN is determined by the employed valuation grade, used by the cartoonist in his play with valuation signs to influence addressees opinion. Forming valuation signs of oppositions, the cartoonist bases on ideas reflected in the lexicon of the German language personality. This feature characterizes all realizations of metaphor UP vs. DOWN in political cartoons.

The Sino–US trade war in political cartoons: A synthesis of semiotic, cognitive, and cultural perspectives

Economic globalization has resulted in more frequent trading frictions, some of which have escalated into trade wars such as the one between China and the US. Drawing on the same corpus built by Zhang and Forceville (Zhang, Cun & Charles Forceville. 2020. Metaphor and metonymy in Chinese and American political cartoons (2018–2019) about the Sino–US trade conflict. Pragmatics and Cognition 27(2). 476–501), and complementing insights of that paper, this paper investigates how the Sino–US trade war is metaphorically and metonymically constructed in 129 Chinese and American political cartoons respectively from a synthesized perspective. Based on comparative analyses, cross-cultural similarity and uniqueness in the semiotic, cognitive, and cultural aspects can be concluded as follows: (a) at the expression level, the shared dominant mode configuration pattern of metaphor and metonymy requires extra-textual knowledge to identify the target domain/concept while the source domain/vehicle concept is pinpointed through pictorial resources; (b) at the cognition level, “us” and “them” are distinctively evaluated by using the metonymy BODILY REACTION FOR EMOTION, cultural symbols, and the Great Chain metaphor. The Chinese cartoons converge on disapproving of “them” while the American cartoons converge on disapproving of “us” and diverge on conceptualizing “them”; (c) a variety of cross-cultural default scenarios are employed in the Chinese cartoons whereas the American cartoons utilize non-default scenarios influenced by only American cultures. Both aim for persuasiveness by employing emotionally charged source domains/vehicle concepts, but to different audiences.

Study of Acceptance of Indian Political Cartoons in Facebook Landscape

Indian society changed after digitalization and economical reformation. Currently, the Facebook is the most popular social media in India. The political cartoonist took that platform as an opportunity to share their thoughts and raise socio-political issues through their cartoons. The aim of the paper is to study responses (likingness and affective) to political cartoons in respect to responsiveness towards cartoons, gender, and socio-economic status. The study was conducted among 875 Indians from different parts of India including males and females with various socio-economic backgrounds. The data captured in the form of sentiments (love, sadness, angry and happiness emotions) for each cartoon shared in the Facebook timeline. Then, relevant descriptive statistics were computed using IBM SPSS 20.0 software. Results showed that maximum Facebook users expressed their thoughts about political cartoons through emoticons in terms of like, sad, angry, and happiness. It is found that male user are more likely to be expressive to political cartoons than female user. Mostly user from low and middle socio-economic backgrounds relate themselves with the cartoon scenarios and shown interest than users from higher class of the society. Hence, political socio-political scenarios can be communicated effectively using political cartoons in Facebook as the people of India are relating themselves with various cartoons.

Promotion of Critical Reading through the Use of Political Cartoons

Critical exploration of socio-political issues has been a topic strongly carried out in English classrooms in the last decades. This article is the result of a research study that shows what the use of political cartoons reveals about the promotion of critical reading in an EFL classroom at a private university in Colombia. The study was developed with fourteen students under a qualitative case study method. Workshops, teacher journals and focus-group interviews were used to collect data. The emerging categories show the positive results of using political cartoons and the change that the students had in their thoughts and actions in both the academic and social context. In the results, the students portray how they have perceived the ELT classroom, the importance of being a critical reader of texts and contexts, and how the different activities helped them construct their own critical awareness concerning social and political issues.

Means of informal communication in political cartoons

This article attempts to analyze means of communication such as euphemisms and dysphemisms in a political cartoon. Free expression of personal and public opinion, political humor and political cartoon became an important part of the information sphere. This makes the genre of political cartoon more relevant than ever. The cartoon consists of verbal and visual components, which make the choice of communication tools in the text especially difficult. This determined the problem of our study. We have analyzed political cartoons published in the American media. Using the method of content analysis, we selected 174 euphemisms and dysphemisms, which we divided into lexical-semantic categories. As a result, euphemisms are used frequently in political cartoon than dysphemisms, which, is caused by the genre specificity, thus, the ironical effect is achieved by the contrast between the verbal and visual components.