Precedence as a Category of a Policode Text of Political Cartoons in the Arabic and French Languages

Abstract

The article presents the material and the results of the study of a political cartoon in the Arabic and French languages. The relevance of this work is due to the description of the precedence in a polycode text in a comparative aspect due to the lack of a sufficient number of scientific papers affecting this issue. The authors offer an overview of the main stages of the study of texts with iconic and verbal components and different types of the component links; and history of the appearance of the terms that nominate this type of text. The text in our research is characterized by the use of semiotic codes, for example, colour and kinesics; it is accompanied by paragraphemic means, which are font variations that go beyond the use of punctuation marks in the standard language, and topographic means, representing various flat layouts of text. The implementation of the described type of text becomes a political discourse, the study of which also relates to the actual research topics of modern linguistics. It should be noted that a political cartoon is always a reflection of the opinion of society or an individual’s reaction to a significant public event, and it is its universal feature, which makes it possible to compare the means and categories of a creolized text of political cartoon in different linguistic cultures/in different languages. The object of the analysis is the creolized text of a political cartoon; the subject of the research is the category of precedence and its features aimed at the realization of the author’s intention in the political cartoon in Arabic and French. An important systemic characteristic of a creolized text is the category of precedence, which in this article corresponds to the category of intertextuality. The authors give examples to examine the use of precedent information at the level of the text and the image and their interconnection. The thorough analysis of the cartoons demonstrates the possibility of decoding a precedent sign in accordance with the type of speech culture of a native speaker. Precedence in a political cartoon can be expressed by a textual or graphic representation of universal human precedent phenomena, civilizational precedent phenomena, onyms and events of a supraregional nature. The formal expression of precedence can also be a symbol. In the conclusion, the article proposes a summary of the results of the study.

Arab Political Cartoon as a Response to the Foreign and Domestic Policies of the State

“…Only a limited number of Russian studies focus on modern Arabic cartoons 1 . Meanwhile, an analysis of this phenomenon could provide rich material not only for orientalists, but also for specialists in such fields as philology, history, sociology, politics and economics.…”