Construction Of Political Integrity As A Multimodal Speech Act In Educational Political Cartoons

At present,studies on political integrity are mainly at the levels of sociology,politics,law,etc.while few make discussions from the perspective of linguistics.Educational political cartoon is one of the independent,important and extensive text forms of the dissemination of political integrity.However,most studies on political cartoons focus on the interpretation and study on the process of meaning production from pragmatics is not sufficient.This thesis takes the multimodal speech act of political integrity in educational political cartoons in our nation as the research object and discusses the process of its meaning construction,including the pragmatic structure,classification and linguistic resources.The research takes 50 cartoon texts on political integrity as data,which are selected from cartoon texts on political integrity in a themed contest “Clean China” in 2014 on the website of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.In the thesis,Speech Act Theory,Visual Grammar and Appraisal Theory are integrated for a qualitative analysis of the multimodal speech act of political integrity.First,based on the Speech Act Theory and ideas drawn from Chinese philosophers,the pragmatic connotation of political integrity as a speech act is concluded.Then,with reference to data,the cartoon texts on political integrity are classified.Finally,the expression and semiotic resources of the multimodal speech act of political integrity are discussed on the basis of a detailed discourse analysis.Conceptually,this thesis temporarily regards Lian as a superordinate with generalized meanings which refers to the degree of self-discipline and impartiality of an individual or group.It covers two opposite or complementary subordinates,namely,specific states of positive Lianjie and negative Non-lianjie or corruption respectively.As a multimodal speech act,discourse of political integrity in educational cartoon texts has two types: praising and warning,which are realized by the pragmatic evaluation of the behavior and attitude of cartoon text narrator(or the specific protagonist)towards fortune and power.Accordingly,educational cartoon texts on political integrity are classified into three categories as warning corruption,praising political integrity and a combination of warning and praising.In the specific discourse construction of educational multimodal speech act of political integrity,modality and appraisal meanings of visual semiotic resources such as color,shape,space etc.are frequently applied to evaluate the figure,object or behaviors in the narratives of cartoon texts,either to compliment positive integrity or to warn negative corruption in educating the viewers.To be specific,colors of high modal values are more frequently used to warn corruption or praise clean behaviors.The upscaling and downscaling of force and focus in gradual visual resources highlight the focus of warning and praising presented in cartoon texts,which form a firm position and attitude to resonate with viewers.In addition,contact,gesture etc.are also used to perform the multimodal speech act.This thesis studies cartoon texts on political integrity from the perspective of multimodal pragmatics and summarizes their text type and pragmatic structure.It complements findings in related research and extends them in a way.The research results provide appropriate suggestions for the creation and dissemination of cartoon texts on political integrity.