A Study Of The Political Cartoons On Zika Virus Of The 2016 Rio Olympics

Since Forceville(1996)proposed the Multimodal Metaphor,i.e.,the conceptual metaphor not only exists in language,but also exists in some other modes,such as visual image and sound,etc.,the studies of political cartoons have been paid a lot of attentions to by some researchers.Some(Philippe,1982;Morrison,1992;Edwards,1997;Templin,1999)thought that metaphor is a very popular cognitive tool for cartoonists to convey their views.Many scholars home and abroad have studied political cartoons with the multimodal metaphor and metonymy,finding that both monomodal and multimodal metaphors exist in the political cartoons;metaphor is the main means to express the negative views;the ways readers understand the metaphors in language and picture are similar;the readers’ educational background and knowledge of the current affairs affect the understanding of the cartoons;readers can understand the schematic target domain through the categorical source domain.Though these researchers have done a lot of contributions to the studies of the political cartoons,few of them have conducted research based on the corpus of one topic.In view of it,the topic on Zika virus of the 2016 Rio Olympics is selected,on which eight political cartoons are taken from Washington Post and NewsBlaze as corpus,analyzing the multimodal metaphors and metonymies in the cartoons,explaining their ways and types of presenting the information,and exploring their meaning construction and the characteristics of cognitive mechanism.By analyzing these cartoons,the results show:(1)The metonymy is widely used in the political cartoons about Zika virus,which is similar to metaphor in frequency,indicating that both of them are very popular tools for cartoonists to convey the negative views and play a very important role in meaning constructing and understanding.On metonymy,there are four cognitive concepts employed,i.e.,from higher to lower in rank,“CONCRETE FOR ABSTRACT”,“ABSTRACT FOR CONCRETE”,“WHOLE FOR PART” and “PART FOR WHOLE”,implying that the abstract Zika viruses are generally expressed by the concrete aedes.On metaphor,the metaphorical concepts “UP-DOWN” are mostly used,showing that the cartoonists have thesimilar experience on space with the readers,thus the readers can understand the views cartoonists convey.(2)In the political cartoons about Zika virus,there are both monomodal visual and multimodal verbal-visual metaphors and metonymies.In some of the cartoons,cartoonists make use of the verbal mode to help readers construe the visual mode correctly,which is more frequently employed in metonymy than that in metaphor.The reason for the result is that the part in the same cognitive domain is not so easily salient in the cartoons if the verbal information is not used;the lack of salience would lead to readers’ misunderstanding of the cartoons.Yet there are more monomodal metaphors than metonymies,the reason for which is that the orientational and ontological metaphors,such as “UP-DOWN”,“SIZE” and“QUANTITY” concepts,are very familiar to and easy to understand for readers,thus it is not necessary to use verbal information.Though the present study has made a few contributions to the political cartoons from the perspective of Cognitive Multimodal Metaphor and Metonymy,it has some demerits,such as the amount of political cartoons is limited,and the analysis of them is not so thorough.We hope to improve the study from two aspects: collecting more political cartoons and combining the study with some relevant reports.