Case Studies–Political and Non-Political Cartoons

The genre of political cartoons purports to present a wittily critical visual or visual-plus-written-verbal commentary on politicians and states of affairs in the world. The genre is thereby of high interest for critical discourse analysts, as it lays bare a community’s ideological assumptions and does so in a pithy, easily accessible form. Moreover, the genre can get away with proposing ideas that, when presented in the verbal mode, would be unacceptably offensive or crude. From an RT perspective, it is clear that since cartoons typically appear in specific newspapers and magazine, cartoonists have a fairly precise idea of the target audience to whom they want to be optimally relevant. The chapter outlines the conventions of the cartoon genre in some detail, then examines four political and two non-political cartoons in the light of their communicative and informative intentions, aspects of reference assignment, implicated premises, and explicatures and implicatures. Other aspects that are briefly addressed are cartoons’ artist-dependent style, need for stereotypical depiction and caricaturization, deployment of metaphors, and loose use of visuals.

Relevance Theory and Mediated Mass-Communication

The examples analyzed in classic RT pertain to face-to-face communication, that is, a situation in which one communicator speaks to a single addressee standing next to her. The shift from this situation to mass-communication affects several dimensions of RT. In this chapter, the central RT tenet that relevance is always relevance to an individual is discussed in light of the fact that mass-communicative audiences consist of (very) many individuals. Concepts affected pertain to the recognition and fulfillment of the communicative and informative intention and to the cognitive environment (≈ background knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, etc.) of the numerous individuals in the envisaged audience, who after all may not share the ideological assumptions of the communicator. Moreover, mass-communication is usually mediated. Some of the technical, financial, institutional, and ideological consequences of mediated mass-communication for RT are sketched.

Adapting Relevance Theory to Accommodate Visual Communication

On the basis of relevance theory’s claim that the relevance principle underlies all forms of communication, Chapter 3 examines how the RT model can be applied to communication involving visuals, and what adaptations are called for to achieve this goal. After reflecting on what constitutes visual communication, and showing how static visuals often combine with written language to create multimodal meaning, all of the RT concepts discussed in Chapter 2 are reconsidered with reference to their pertinence to analyzing visuals. This reconsideration will not only benefit visual and multimodal theories but will also provide new angles on classic RT. Whereas many RT concepts function without any problem when applied to visuals, there are others that cannot straightforwardly be “translated” to the visual realm and therefore need adaptation. The problematic issues mainly result from the fact that visuals typically have a structure and depicted entities, but no grammar and vocabulary. This leads to the questions of whether visuals can nonetheless be “coded”—which in turn has consequences for their possible underlying “logical form”—and whether information in visuals is necessarily always to be inferred or is sometimes actually decoded. Several examples are discussed to clarify these issues. In the final sections, there is a brief discussions of the relation between RT and Blending Theory, and of RT’s problematic take on metaphor.

Introduction

It is a truth universally acknowledged that visual information plays an ever greater role in modern communication. Undoubtedly, language remains our species’ most sophisticated channel for exchanging information, but the verbal mode is increasingly complemented, sometimes even replaced, by other modes, among which the visual mode takes pride of place....

Concluding Remarks

The final chapter first recaptures the most important claims made in the book and outlines issues and dimensions within RT that deserve further thought in the service of improving the theory. Next, suggestions are presented for how an RT analysis of modes, media, and genres not addressed in this book might be developed. The book ends with a recapitulation of why it is useful to adopt RT as the overall model for the analysis of visual, multimodal, and other forms of communication—although it will always have to be complemented by insights from other theories and models. Given that the relevance principle inextricably links communication to perception and cognition in all living species, RT’s insights may feed into experiments both with humans and with other primates, and even non-primates, and may help theorize robotic communication.

Controversial Communication

Although neutral about ethics and ideologies, RT acknowledges that while claiming to be optimally relevant to their envisaged audiences, communicators may not be entirely truthful—or may shamelessly lie through their teeth—by accommodating the issue of trust in its model. More specifically, RT distinguishes between addressees believing (1) that a communicator is both competent and benevolent; (2) that the communicator is benevolent but not necessarily competent; or (3) that the communicator may be less than benevolent. This chapter examines a number of misleading mass-communicative visual and multimodal messages and shows how their contentious nature can be accounted for in RT terms. It further argues that the RT concept of “echoic mention,” developed to theorize irony, can be extended to other types of transformative use of original messages, and thereby is a cognate of what in other paradigms is called “intertextuality.”

Case Studies–Comics

The antecedents of the genre of comics and graphic novels could be dated as far back as Christ’s Stations of the Cross in numerous churches, but the genre of “sequential art’ ” (Will Eisner 2006 [1985]) really took off in the late 19th century and was baptized the “ninth art” in the course of the 20th. It typically consists of visuals combined with written language. Comics sport a number of visual elements that are to be decoded rather than inferred by the reader-viewer, such as pictograms, balloons, and motion and emotion lines. Moreover, the audience of comics is expected to be familiar with meaning-generating mechanisms such as onomatopoeia and the “gutter,” and to understand how to navigate from panel to panel. Comics artists help their audience achieve relevance by tapping into these readers/viewers’ knowledge of narrative codes and conventions. These include the three classic mechanisms of surprise, suspense, and curiosity, and the distinction between omniscient (or external) narrators and character-narrators. The case studies include panels or sequences from work by Hergé, Shaun Tan, Peter de Wit, Lewis Trondheim, Guy Delisle, Johanna Sinisalo and Hannu Mänttäri, and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, as well as IKEA instructions on a do-it-yourself (DIY) package. The chapter shows how achieving relevance requires appropriate reference assignment, enrichment, broadening or narrowing assumptions, processing loose visuals, correctly adducing implicated premises, and generating explicatures and implicatures.

Case Studies–Advertising

The second genre investigated is advertising, which has the very strong convention that it makes positive claims for a product, a service, or an idea. To begin with, it is claimed that to the extent that an advertisement conveys part of its message visually, even someone not familiar with the language used in an ad will understand at least part of the information conveyed—thanks to fonts, font sizes, colors, and knowledge about elements that conventionally appear in an advertisement or billboard. To demonstrate this, a Chinese advertisement is examined, initially without paying attention to the semantics of the written text. Several advertisements of different types are analyzed in light of how their place of occurrence helps guide the envisaged audience to derive relevance.

Genre

How is it that mass audiences often understand messages in remarkably similar ways, even though these audiences consist of many individuals, all of whom have to process these messages in their own unique cognitive environments? The answer is that just as people are very good in assessing what activity-type (Goffman) they are about to be involved in (visiting a museum, having a meeting with colleagues, going for dinner, attending a wedding), they are usually well aware of the genre of a discourse they are confronted with. Thanks to various genre-markers, they come to this awareness often even before they encounter the discourse itself. This awareness enormously steers and constrains people’s search for relevance in a discourse. Therefore, genre serves as an “interface” that greatly narrows down the infinitely large storehouse of knowledge, emotions, and attitudes that could theoretically be evoked by a discourse to the small subset of these that are directly relevant. Discourse genre, which in this chapter is taken to be equivalent to discourse type, is thereby the single most important pragmatic principle governing the interpretation of mass-communicative messages. This chapter discusses several sources on genre to support this view, discusses the importance of prototype theory for the notion of genre, and demonstrates how the importance of genre can be accommodated in classic RT.

Relevance Theory—Basics

After showing how relevance theory is rooted in Grice’s “communicative principles,” the chapter explains the most important dimensions of “classic,” spoken language-oriented relevance theory and introduces the terminology used to label these dimensions, defining them for an audience of non-experts. Examples are used throughout to facilitate readers’ comprehension. The terms and concepts discussed are the Cognitive Principle of Relevance (generally referred to as the First, Cognitive Principle of Relevance) and the Communicative Principle of Relevance (generally referred to as the Second, Communicative Principle of Relevance); the communicative and the informative intention; recognizing and fulfilling intentions; positive cognitive effects/rewards and mental effort; decoding and inferring; the logical form; reference assignment, disambiguation, and enrichment; explicatures and implicatures; strong and weak communication; relevance to an individual; descriptive and interpretive utterances; symptomatic communication; loose talk; babbling and lying; optimal stimuli; relevance and trust; relevance and altruism; and the falsifiability of relevance theory. The chapter ends with a paragraph in which relevance theory’s fundamental tenets are summarized in non-technical terms.