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Article published In:
Visual Metaphors
Edited by Réka Benczes and Veronika Szelid
[Cognitive Linguistic Studies 7:1] 2020
► pp. 222–253
Applications of visual and linguistic metaphor

Multimodal conceptual patterns of Hungary in political cartoons

| Corvinus University of Budapest
Conventionalized positive images of Hungary have been overemphasized in political caricatures ever since the nineteenth century (Tamás 2012, 2014). The present article explores the multimodal representations of hungary in cartoons in the period between 1989 and 1990, during which negative images of Hungary became prominent due to the weak financial situation of the country and the political system change. The corpus involves seventy-five cartoons from the satirical magazine Ludas Matyi. Two major claims are justified by adopting Paula Pérez-Sobrino’s (2017) multimodal identification procedure: (1) the interpretation of verbal elements (e.g., labels, verbal texts, and verbal symbols) in political cartoons influences the identification of multimodal conceptual patterns; (2) the dominant patterns that structure the representation of hungary in political cartoons are metonymy-based visual and multimodal metaphors, and both of them occur in metaphorical scenarios. The corpus analysis indicates that the two main target frames, financial crisis and political changes, appear through the sources of human body and object in metaphorical scenarios, such as ordinary scenes, motion, hospital, sport, tale, love, feast, stunt, begging, and church scenes. Apart from identifying the representations of Hungary, visual metonymies as well as textual cues need to be revealed in order to understand what metaphtonymy scenarios are intended in the cartoons.
Keywords: political cartoon, multimodality, metaphtonymy scenario, hungary
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical insights
    • 2.1Political cartoon as a genre
    • 2.2Relationship of verbal and visual elements in political cartoons
    • 2.3Metaphtonomy
    • 2.4Methodology
  • 3.Corpus-related multimodal structures
    • 3.1Metaphoric scenario vs. metaphtonymy scenario
    • 3.2Hungary is an object
    • 3.3Hungary is a person
  • 4.Corpus analysis
  • 5.Multimodal conceptual patterns in the corpus
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 August 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cogls.00055.vir
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