Metaphors in editorial cartoons representing the global financial crisis

Abstract

Lakoff and Johnson claim that metaphors play a crucial role in systematically structuring concepts, not just language. Probing the validity of this far-reaching claim requires an investigation of multimodal discourse. In this article, the authors analyse the 25 metaphors that structure a sample of 30 political cartoons pertaining to the global financial crisis that hit the world in 2008, and find that certain source domains recur systematically. They examine the role of visual and verbal modalities and argue that metaphors are manifestations of underlying conceptual ones. In the service of future research pertaining to multimodal metaphor and multimodal discourse, the authors also reflect on the methodological problems they encountered, and on the decisions they took to solve them.

Multimodality and the Construal of Reality in Political Cartoons – The Case of Serbia-Eu Relationship

“…Since political cartoons in newspapers can hinge on only two modalities (verbal and visual), metaphors in our analysis belong to either monomodal metaphors, i.e. either pictorial/visual metaphors, or to multimodal metaphors, composed of both the verbal and visual modalities (Bounegru & Forceville 2011). It is also worth emphasising that the motivation for mapping the source domain onto the target domain in multimodal metaphors goes well beyond the notion of embodiment, which is so widely used in CMT to provide concreteness to the source domain.…”

“…and Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black 2004;Musolff 2006) with research on multimodality from a cognitive viewpoint (Forceville 1996(Forceville , 2008 Forceville & UriosAparisi 2009;Bounegru & Forceville 2011; etc.) 2009-2015, which …”

“…Still, there have been several studies (e.g. Bounegru & Forceville 2011;Forceville 2005;El Refaie 2003;Negro Alousque 2013) which pertain to the ways this example of multimodal discourse communicates with readers in order to construct a desired view of political and social reality through metaphors. Lakoff and Johnson"s (1980) claim that metaphor is not just a matter of language but an essential feature of our mind gives full relevance to the opinion that in addition to language, conceptual metaphor can manifest itself in other, non-verbal modes of communication.…”

“…), in this paper we address the topic of Serbia-EU relations unfolded in pictorial and multimodal discourse in media in order to explore how this topic is communicated to readers via metaphors and other cognitive instruments in political cartoons. Modelling our method of analysis on Bounegru and Forceville (2011), we try to show how pictorial and multimodal metaphors reveal the underlying metaphor scenarios, those of JOURNEY, SCHOOL, SPORT and LIQUID.…”

“…Thus, complementing the broad framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson 1980;Johnson 1987;Benczes, Barcelona, & Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez 2011;etc. ) and Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black 2004;Musolff 2006) with research on multimodality from a cognitive viewpoint (Forceville 1996(Forceville , 2008Forceville & Urios-Aparisi 2009;Bounegru & Forceville 2011;etc. ), in this paper we address the topic of Serbia-EU relations unfolded in pictorial and multimodal discourse in media in order to explore how this topic is communicated to readers via metaphors and other cognitive instruments in political cartoons.…”