A Study Of Visual-verbal Meaning Of Multimodal Metaphor In Political Cartoons

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, multimodality research has been on the flourishing trend. Language is no longer used to express meaning alone. On the contrary, multiple meanings are made through the interaction between language and other symbols, leading to the emergence of “multimodal discourse analysis”. Multimodal Discourse Analysis(MDA) is an approach to discourse, which focuses on how meaning is made through the use of multiple modes of communication, including words, image, sound, action as opposed to just language. MDA in linguistics is manipulated mainly from two perspectives: the social semiotic perspective based on systemic functional linguistics and conceptual metaphor perspective based on cognitive linguistics. The former discusses how textual meaning is produced in the context through semiological practice in specific culture. The latter is embodied as “multimodal metaphor” in multimodal discourse, which pays attention to how different types of metaphors act on our cognitive context and influence our cognitive interpretation. However, MDA is conducted with little intersection, either from functional perspective or cognitive perspective. As a characteristic genre, political cartoon is an illustration, usually in a single panel published in the editorial or comments pages of a newspaper, whose purpose is to represent an aspect of social, cultural or political life in a way that condenses reality and transforms it in a striking, original or humorous way. In recent years, political cartoons are attached great importance by scholars at home and abroad.In this thesis, Appraisal Theory and its adaptation on the visual level are adopted as the primary theoretical frameworks, supplemented by cognitive theories of conceptual metaphor and multimodal metaphor. By data collection, marker and statistics with the help of multimedia software NVivo 10, four categories of cartoons are selected from www.politicalcartoons.com as the corpora, aiming to answer the following three questions in detail:1) What are the distributions of appraisal resources in political cartoons and which type is preferred by cartoonists?2) Are there any similarities or differences among four types of political cartoons on the distribution of appraisal resources? And why?3) How do verbal and visual modes interact to encode evaluative and metaphorical meanings in political cartoons?The research findings are presented as follows:1) It is counted that a total of 1181 graduation items are collected in 100 political cartoons. Attitude(560) is also frequently utilized while engagement is almost invisible. In the attitude system, the proportion of judgement(46.6%) is the largest among the ratios of the three subcategories(affect, 35.9%; appreciation, 17.5%). Under graduation system, force(62.6%) is more popular than focus(37.4%), suggesting an abundance of exaggerative techniques adopted by cartoonists.2) There are also similarities and differences on the distributions among four categories of cartoons. Within the subsystem of attitude, judgement stands out as the principal way for attitudinal meanings in economy and military in which figures are highly involved rather than in social affairs and health care. However, the distributions of five options of judgement in four categories display somewhat consistency: normality and propriety most frequently used; capacity relatively implicit in the third place; tenacity and veracity least involved. It is worth noting that negative items have prominent advantage over positive items except in the case of social affairs. As to affect, social affairs has the most attitudinal values while health care has the least. Concerning internal distributions, dis/satisfaction is preferred in social affairs while in/security is more widely used in military and health care. In contrast to affect and judgement, appreciation is the least utilized attitudinal resource in political cartoons. It is attached great importance to the category of health care for its advantage on the number of objects compared with the other three categories. Within the subsystem of graduation, force is most frequently adopted in social affairs and health care. And it presents similar distribution of force and focus in economy and military. Of the three options(quantification, intensification and repetition) of force, high-level items prevail over low-level ones, but such tendency is not apparent in economy and military, which has something to do with cartoonists’ intention to visualize the politician by fusion of big head and small body. Compared to quantification and intensification, repetition is barely visible but shows some potential in the category of health care.3) As to verbal-visual interaction concerning appraisal in cartoons, there exists both congruence and incongruence of evaluation between verbal mode and visual mode. That is to say, it can either produce reinforcement effect through repetition of similar evaluative meanings, or generate a deepening ideational meaning by dissonance, when appraisals of the same ideational item conflict. Moreover, in the single mode there also exists dissonance, which is regarded as the source of humor in the political cartoon. It is also proposed that the specific contribution of bimodal interaction to evaluative meaning may lie in the different values associated with the verbal and visual modes in cartoon contexts. The verbal mode is associated with representation of figure’s personality, while authorial and viewer alignment is realized in the visual mode.In addition, it is also discovered that plentiful scenario metaphors are identified in political cartoons, particularly in economy and military, in which cartoon figures are placed in irrelevant scenarios like hospital, kitchen, sports game, etc. The verbal mode, though in a subordinate position, plays an indispensable role in the interpretation of metaphors by identifying source or target domain, which is also affected by readers’ cultural background and knowledge. Most importantly, it is found that in some cases the successful interpretation of metaphors facilitates the understanding of relevant evaluative meanings.By integrating appraisal and metaphor, the thesis delves into analyzing political cartoons from a brand-new perspective. The above research findings will provide some inspirations for MDA practice. And also practically, this thesis proposes guidance for readers to improve visual literacy to meet the demand of talent cultivation in the information era.