Multimodal Fusion in Analyzing Political Cartoons: Debates on U.S. Beef Imports Into Taiwan

Abstract

This study proposes a multimodal fusion model to account for the cognitive mechanisms involving 56 political cartoons (multimodal corpus) with regard to U.S. beef import issues as reported in two dominant Taiwanese newspapers, the Liberty Times and United Daily News. Specifically, this study claims that multimodal fusion model evolves from two metonymic-metaphoric networks, i.e., related metonymic network and diversified metaphoric network, and combines the conceptual, visual, and verbal modes. Our analysis demonstrates that multimodal fusion is a significant and recurrent representation technique in the genre of political cartoon and has the cognitive function of encapsulating the abstract complex political debates efficiently with irony and humorous effect. Furthermore, our analysis shows the important role of metonymy and demonstrates how metonymies and metaphors are interwoven in the process of multimodal fusion, which underlies the metaphorical mappings of conceptual scenarios related to "POLITICS IS GAME" and "POLITICS IS WAR." Finally, this study shows that although the critical messages and distinct stances of political cartoons in two newspapers both emerge through multimodal fusion, they are highlighted and contrasted through prominent visual features and verbal context shown in the cartoons.

Distinguishing cartoon subgenres based on a multicultural contemporary corpus

“…In-depth studies about how different rhetorical resources cooperate are scarce. Some contributions are focused on the interaction between metaphor and metonymy (Goossens 1990;Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez & Mairal Usón 2007;Negro Alousque 2013;Ying-Yu Lin & Chiang 2015) and some others offer a general panorama (Pedrazzini & Scheuer 2012). In this particular research about political cartoons, we observed an association between irony and sarcasm and other figures of thought such as allusion operating in the verbal mode.…”

“…A more moderate position confers to political cartoon the status of a discursive genre on its own (for instance El Refaie 2009; Negro Alousque 2013; Ying-Yu Lin & Chiang 2015). One way or another, such dominance has resulted in the omission of other types of cartoons as a noteworthy object of research.…”

Pictorial and Multimodal Metaphor in Saudi Editorial Cartoons Representing Social Media Impact on Saudis

“…Secondly, a parallel research line explores non-verbal/ visual and multimodal metaphor in advertisement and commercials (Forceville, 1994(Forceville, , 1996(Forceville, , 2007(Forceville, , 2008(Forceville, , 2017Hallett & Hallett, 2012;Lin & Chiang, 2015;Namitcheishvili, 2019;Negro, 2017), editorial cartoons (Lin & Chiang, 2015, El Refaie, 2003, Forceville, 1994Negro, 2017;Lan & Zuo, 2016), editorial cartoons (Liliana & Forceville, 2011), comics (Shinohara & Matsunaka, 2009); films and cinema (Forceville, 2016b;Muller & Kappelhoff, 2018), animated cartoons (Popa, 2013), and, recently, fashion (Uno, Matsuda, & Indurkhya, 2019).…”

“…Further, the interplay of different semiotic modes and multimodal metaphors cannot be achieved unless the socio-cultural aspect is considered, which is manifested in the use of idiomatic and metaphoric expressions known to the Saudi reader. Lin and Chiang (2015) studied a multimodal corpus involving 56 multimodal cartoons depicting the importing of U.S. beef in two dominant Taiwanese newspapers: Liberty Times and United Daily News. They proposed a multimodal fusion model of combined verbal, visual, and conceptual modes to account for the cognitive mechanism involved in the perception of metonymic-metaphoric networks in the corpus of 56 political cartoons.…”

Editorial cartoon collections: a review of indexing challenges

“…Rafferty (2011) discusses multimodality and its relationship to interpretation in the context of user tagging of website images. Lin and Chiang (2015) discuss multimodal fusion in cartoons addressing US beef imports into Taiwan, for instance. However, researchers have pointed out that the full spectrum of multimodal meanings intended by cartoonists may not necessarily be understood by viewers if they do not have all of the necessary background knowledge to inform their individual interpretation (Schilperoord and Maes, 2009).…”