| Mediated political cartoons, as a particular type of multimodal discourse that is often constituted by images and words, have been playing a quite significant role in contemporary media such as newspapers and magazines. They typically employ artistic skills like hyperbole, metaphor and satire to convey commentaries on certain current personalities or events. Meanwhile, political cartoons on newspapers are deemed to contain variant ideologies and power relations. China and America, which are regarded as the representatives of the developing and developed countries, are rooted in distinctive historical and cultural background. In this sense, the divided ideologies and power relations can be as well reflected in the mediated cartoons in two nations. Hence, this thesis attempts to make a comparative study of Chinese and American mediated political cartoons, with the purpose of illuminating their similarities and differences in terms of meaning construction and revealing the different power relations and ideologies behind them.In the current study, Systemic Functional Grammar, Visual Grammar and Fairclough’s analytical model are integrated as the theoretical framework and a comparative study is conducted between Chinese and American mediated political cartoons. Through a qualitative and quantitative analysis of 40 mediated political cartoons on the Ukrainian crisis selected from http://cartoon.chinadaily.com.cn/and The New York Times, the following four conclusions are achieved:Firstly, action process and symbolic process are all employed in Chinese and American mediated political cartoons to construct representational meanings. Speech and mental process, together with analytical process are more preferred by American mediated cartoons to represent the meanings more profoundly. The different representational meanings of Chinese and American mediated cartoons are also realized through the variant frequencies of participants like Putin and polar bear.Secondly, concerning the interactive meaning which includes contact, social distance, perspective and modality, it shows that most mediated cartoons in China and America are offer pictures and taken from long or medium shot. In addition, frontal and eye-level angle, together with sensory and abstract coding orientations are used in the majority of Chinese and American mediated cartoons. However, more abstract coding orientations are contained in American cartoons.Thirdly, as for the compositional meaning, visual elements in most Chinese and American mediated cartoons are deployed "left and right" and "top and bottom", yet with different new information. Foreground and relative size are favored for salience by all Chinese and American mediated cartoons, but more American cartoons employ contrastive color. Moreover, dividing lines and discontinuity of space and color are the more widely used framing devices in American cartoons.Lastly, in terms of ideologies and power relations, it suggests that the images of Putin and Russia in Chinese and American mediated cartoons are totally different. The American cartoons are full of criticism of Putin and Russia while Chinese ones imply China’s more objective stance and its more close relations with Russia. These differences are closely associated with the different socio-cultural contexts of China and the United States.This comparative research on Chinese and American mediated cartoons is of significance both in theory and practice. For its theoretical value, this thesis conducts a comparative study on Chinese and American mediated cartoons within the framework of Systemic Functional Grammar, Visual Grammar and Fairclough’s three dimensional model for CDA, which proves their explanatory power in Critical Multimodal Discourse Analysis. Practically, this study can not only promote Chinese mediate cartoons to learn from American ones for better, but also enable readers to foster a critical awareness of mediated cartoons and other multimodal discourse types. |
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