The Conceptualization of Visual and Multimodal Metaphors in Iraqi Newspaper Cartoons
Main Article Content
Abstract
The current study explores the investigation of visual/ pictorial and multimodal metaphors in Iraqi newspaper cartoons. Four approaches were adopted in this study; namely, Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) Conceptual Metaphor Theory to verbalize the materials of the sampled cartoons, Forceville’s (1996), Šorm and Steen’s (2018) VISMIP to recognize the visual/ pictorial metaphors, and Sobrino’s (2017) approach to investigate the multimodal modes of metaphors. Fifty-three cartoons, which were drawn by different cartoonists and published in the Iraqi local newspapers, were selected and sample for this study. The sampled cartoons addressed different issues to shed light on the negative and satirical effects of the daily socio-political and economic issues. The findings revealed that the visual and verbal modes are cued to conceptualize different topics and themes relate to the Iraqi affairs in the Iraqi newspaper cartoons using different source and target domains in addition to visualizing the verbal conventional metaphors. In conclusion, the Iraqi newspaper cartoons showed the metaphorical conceptualizations of different socio-political and economic issues by adopting different secondary subjects (source domains) in verbal and visual modes.
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
References
Abdel-Raheem, A. (2016). Mostafa Houssien’s Satan’s Family: Conceptual blending in a post-coup Egypt editorial cartoon. Metaphor and the Social World. 6. 304-325.
Abdel-Raheem, A. (2022a). News discourse as a source of metaphorical creativity in political cartooning. Language Sciences, 93, 101496.
Abdel-Raheem, A. (2022b). The creative minds of Arab cartoonists: metaphor, culture and context. Text & Talk, 44(2), 141-174.
Abdulwahid, H. Y. (2022). Analyzing Iraqi Political Cartoons: A Semiotic Model. Cihan University-Erbil Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences, 6(1).
Al-Dala’ien, O. A., Al-Shboul, Y., Aldowkat, I. M., & Al-Takhayinh, A. (2022). Visualising the Russia-Ukraine War: A Semiotic Analysis of Arab Social Media Cartoons. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 12(12), 2712-2722.
Alghezzy, K. H. (2017). The image of Iraqi politics in editorial cartoons a semiotic analysis. lark, 9(3), 1-10.
Al-Saedi, H. T. J. (2023). Metaphors in Iraqi Media Discourse: Newspaper Headlines as a Case Study. (Humanities, social and applied sciences) Misan Journal of Academic Studies, 22(48), 292-270.
Bain, J., Chaban, N., & Kelly, S. (2012). Crumbling giant, rising dragon?: Chinese news media cartoon reflections on the Eurozone debt crisis. Communication, Politics & Culture, 45(2), 217-240.
Bergen, B. (2003). To awaken a sleeping giant: Cognition and culture in September 11 political cartoons. Language, culture, and mind, 1-12.
Bounegru, L., & Forceville, C. (2011). Metaphors in editorial cartoons representing the global financial crisis. Visual communication, 10(2), 209-229.
Carroll, N. (1994). Visual metaphor. In Aspects of metaphor (pp. 189-218). Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.
Cienki, A., & Müller, C. (Eds.). (2008). Metaphor and gesture (Vol. 3). John Benjamins Publishing.
Duus, P. (2001). Presidential address: weapons of the weak, weapons of the strong—the development of the Japanese political cartoon. The Journal of Asian Studies, 60(4), 965-997.
Edwards, J. L. (1995). Wee George and the seven dwarfs: Caricature and metaphor in campaign’88 cartoons. INKS 4. Cartoon and Comic Art Studies, 26-34.
El Refaie, E. (2003). Understanding visual metaphor: The example of newspaper cartoons. Visual communication, 2(1), 75-95.
El Refaie, E. (2009a). Metaphor in political cartoons: Exploring audience responses. Multimodal metaphor. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter 173-196.
El Refaie, E. (2009b). Multiliteracies: How readers interpret political cartoons. Visual communication, 8(2), 181-205.
Forceville, C. (1996). Pictorial metaphor in advertising. Routledge.
Forceville, C. (2008). Metaphor in pictures and multimodal representations. The Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought, 462-482.
Forceville, C. (2013). The strategic use of the visual mode in advertising metaphors. In Critical multimodal studies of popular discourse (pp. 55-70). Routledge.
Forceville, C. (2014). Relevance Theory as Model for Analyzing Visual and Multimodal Communication. InVisual Communication, D. Machin (ed), 51–70.
Forceville, C. (2016). Mixing in pictorial and multimodal metaphors?. Mixing Metaphors. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 223-239.
Forceville, C. (2024). Identifying and interpreting visual metaphors in political cartoons. In Manuela Romano (ed.), Metaphor in Socio-Political Contexts: Current Crises. Berlin De Gruyter.
Forceville, C. and van de Laar, N. (2019). “Metaphors portraying right-wing politician Geert Wilders in Dutch political cartoons.” In: Encarnación Hidalgo-Tenorio, Miguel Ángel Benítez-Castro, and Francesca De Cesare (eds), Populist Discourse: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Politics (292-307). London: Routledge.
Forceville, C. and Urios-Apraisi, E. (2009). Multimodal metaphor. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Forceville, Charles (2006). “Non-verbal and multimodal metaphor in a cognitivist framework: Agendas for research.” In: Gitte Kristiansen, Michel Achard, René Dirven and Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza Ibàñez (eds.), Cognitive Linguistics: Current Applications and Future Perspectives. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 379-402.
Jabber, K. W., & Al-Saedi, H. T. J. (2020). A study of hot and cold metaphors in Iraqi Arabic. REiLA: Journal of Research and Innovation in Language, 2(2), 46-58.
Jewitt, C. (Ed.). (2009). An introduction to multimodality. The Routledge handbook of multimodal analysis. London: Routledge.
Kaplan, S. (2004). Visual metaphors in print advertising for fashion products. In Handbook of visual communication (pp. 189-200). Routledge.
Kondowe, W., Ngwira, F. F., & Madula, P. (2014). Linguistic analysis of Malawi political newspaper cartoons on President Joyce Banda: Towards Grice’s conversational implicature.
Kövecses, Z. (2010). Metaphor: A practical introduction. Oxford university press.
Kress, G. (2009). Mode. In Multimodality (pp. 79-102). Routledge.
Kress, G., & Van Leeuwen, T. (2020). Reading images: The grammar of visual design. Routledge.
Kwon, I. (2015). Exploring cognitive mechanisms in French political cartoons Charlie Hebdo. Discourse and Cognition, 22(1), 1-23.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago press.
Liepa, S., Šaudiņa, V., & Oļehnovičs, D. (2021). Metaphorical Representation of the European Union in Political Cartoons in English and Latvian. Research in Language, 19(4), 389-400.
Ma, T. H., & Gao, Y. (2020). Multimodal Metaphors Construction and Critical Analysis of American Political Cartoons: The Case of the U.S.-China Trade Conflict. Foreign Language Research, No. 1, 25-32.
Michelmore, C. (2000). Old pictures in new frames: Images of Islam and Muslims in post-World War II American political cartoons. The Journal of American Culture, 23(4), 37.
Moloney, G., Holtz, P., & Wagner, W. (2013). Editorial political cartoons in Australia: social representations & and the visual depiction of essentialism. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 47, 284-298.
Morrison, S. S. (1992). The feminization of the German Democratic Republic in political cartoons 1989-90. Journal of Popular Culture, 25(4), 35.
Negro, I. (2013). Visual metaphor and metonymy in French political cartoons. Revista española de lingüística aplicada, (26), 365-384.
Negro, I. (2014). Pictorial and verbo-pictorial metaphor in Spanish political cartooning. CÍRCULO de Linguística Aplicada a la Comunicación, 57, 59.
Negro, I. (2015). The role of text in the identification of visual metaphor in advertising. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 212, 309-315.
Negro, I. (2017). The role of visual metaphor in visual genres. EPiC Series in Language and Linguistics, 2, 119-126.
Negro, I., Šorm, E., & Steen, G. (2017). General image understanding in visual metaphor identification. ODISEA: Revista De Estudios Inglesesngleses, 18, 113-131.
Philippe, R. (1982). Political graphics: Art as a weapon. Oxford: Phaidon Press.
Popa, D. E. (2013). Multimodal metaphors in political entertainment. Review of Cognitive Linguistics. Published under the auspices of the Spanish Cognitive Linguistics Association, 11(2), 303-319.
Ruiz de Mendoza, F. (2000). The role of mappings and domains in understanding metonymy. In A. Barcelona (Ed.), Metaphor and metonymy at the crossroads (pp. 109–132). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Ruiz de Mendoza, F. (2002). From semantic underdetermination, via metaphor and metonymy to conceptual interaction. Theoria et Historia Scientiarum. An International Journal for Interdisciplinary Studies, 1(6), 107–143.
Sani, I., Abdullah, M. H., Abdullah, F. S., & Ali, A. M. (2012). Political cartoons as a vehicle of setting social agenda: The newspaper example. Asian Social Science, 8(6), 156.
Saraceni, M. (2003). The language of comics. London. Routledge.
Schilperoord, J. (2018). Ways with pictures: visual incongruities and metaphor. In Visual metaphor: Structure and process. John Benjamins Publishing.
Schilperoord, J., & Maes, A. (2009). Visual metaphoric conceptualization in editorial cartoons. Multimodal metaphor, 11, 213-240.
Silaski, N., & Durovic, T. (2017). Saving the euro–a multimodal analysis of metaphors depicting the Eurozone crisis. Ibérica, (33), 125-146.
Sobrino, P. P. (2017). Multimodal metaphor and metonymy in advertising. John Benjamins Publishing Company
Šorm, E., & Steen, G. (2018). Towards a method for visual metaphor identification. Visual metaphor: Structure and process, 18, 47-88.
Templin, C. (1999). Hillary Clinton as threat to gender norms: Cartoon images of the first lady. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 23(1), 20-36.
Virág, Á. (2020). Multimodal conceptual patterns of Hungary in political cartoons. Cognitive Linguistic Studies, 7(1), 222-253.
Wang, X. (2017). An Embodied View of Physical Signs in News Cartoons. Language and Semiotic Studies, 3(4), 32-54.
Wang, Y. (2021). The metaphors and its critical analysis in COVID-19-related cartoons. Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, 11(4), 539-554.
Yus, F. (2009). Visual metaphor versus verbal metaphor: A unified account. Multimodal metaphor, 147-172.
Zaytoon, H. A. R. (2017). Caricature images for religious profiling: a multimodal analysis of Islamophobia in selected press images. ANGLICA-An International Journal of English Studies, 26(2), 181-224.
Zbikowski, L. (2002). Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press.
Zhang, C., & Forceville, C. (2020). Metaphor and metonymy in Chinese and American political cartoons (2018–2019) about the Sino-US trade conflict. Pragmatics & Cognition, 27(2), 474-499.
Zibin, A. (2022). Monomodal and multimodal metaphors in editorial cartoons on the coronavirus by Jordanian cartoonists. Linguistics Vanguard, 8(1), 383-398.