The Moral Interpretation Of Ironical Cartoons From The Perspectives Of Visual Grammar And Relevance Theory

Social developments are contemporarily accompanied by various changes inour ways of communication and representation. Our verbal communication tends tobe presented in the form of more than one sign or mode, namely, a written discoursewith sounds, image, video etc., instead of being limited only in linguistic forms.Halliday (1978, p.39) holds that language as a social semiotic is essentially a systemof ‘meaning potential’, and grammar is not a set of rules for reference but a source for‘meaning-making’, which implies that any other non-verbal social semiotics in thewhole cultural system are possibly the alternatives used for meaning expression. As aform of art, ironical cartoon is composed of the verbal sign like words and non-verbalsigns such as images, which not only functions as a way of entertaining the public butalso serves as a means of conveying the real intention from the author to readers. Theprevious studies to date have mainly centered on cognitive linguistics, aesthetics,psychology, journalism&communication while scarcely touch upon the moralinterpretation from the pragmatic perspective with the non-verbal signs beingconsidered, which, however, plays an important role in the terms of the socialfunctions of ironical cartoons.As a way of visual communication, from the speaker’s side, the cartoonistsintend to enlighten readers and make their creative purpose conveyed through askillful design of the words and images, which is regarded as a process of conveyingthe real intentions; from readers’ side, the appreciation for cartoons is an interpretingprocess of seeking out how words and image in such a ‘compound language’ canwork cooperatively to achieve an internal optimal relevance and whole discoursecoherence. Therefore, in our paper, taking ironical cartoons as the object and theworks (by the time of January of2014) from the most authoritative cartoonwebsite—Satire and Humor as the data, this research attempts to put forward anapproach, from the perspectives of social semiotics and pragmatics, by combiningVisual Grammar (VG) and Relevance Theory (RT) to investigate the moral interpreting process of ironical cartoons. As the means of ideographical expression,the two communicative signs: words and images are also the ‘meaning potentials’participating in the whole meaning constructions, realized by the involvement offeatures of linguistic behavior, visual behavior and context for the discourse.This paper consists of five chapters. Chapter One mainly deals with themotivation, objectives, methodology, data collection as well as the layout of the wholeessay. In Chapter Two, the author sums up the previous studies from the perspectivesof cognitive linguistics, aesthetics, psychology, journalism&communication after theclarification of some key terms’ definitions. The contributions as well as limitationsare also pointed out at last. Chapter Three first makes an introduction of RT and VGand their advantages and disadvantages respectively followed by a specificexplanation of the possibility, limitations and necessity of combining these twotheories. Chapter Four mainly focuses on the case studies based on the theoreticalframework above except a brief introduction of the data source, collection andclassification. Chapter five concludes the results, and points out the limitations andsome suggestions for the future studies.This paper holds that in terms of the moral interpretation of ironical cartoons,the readers can start their analysis from the internal cooperation between signs in acartoon discourse from the angles of representation, interaction and composition toobtain the implicated premise first which then is combined with word meaning andcontextual features to help next infer the optimal relevance between the image andwords and whole discourse coherence so that the moral in this ironical cartoon can besuccessfully achieved at final stage.Through this research from the social semiotic and pragmatic perspective, it isfound that:1) The major form used in ironical cartoons is the narrative discourse withaction, reactional, speech&mental or mixed process;2) The moral interpretation of ironical cartoons is a multi-level ostensive-inferential process, in which, the implicated premise can be obtained from the analysisof the internal cooperation between signs in cartoon discourse to presuppose the optimal relevance between the image and words;3) The distribution of information value in ironical cartoons generally goes withthe image-text relations discussed in VG, which justifies the iconicity in human’scognition of the world;4) Words in ironical cartoons not only affect the understanding of the image butalso highlight cartoonists’ subjective attitudes towards the described events orphenomena;5) Nonverbal signs in ironical cartoons like color, facial expressions, havepotential information values and can help stimulate relevant assumptions in readersrelated to the intended moral.In addition, the contributions in this research lie in following aspects:1) Theoretically, the research scope has been expanded to the non-verbal aspectsand fills the gap of RT that lies in non-linguistic researches, which will be a positiveattempt to the social semiotic-pragmatic research and justify the feasibility ofapplying VG to the analysis of visuals within the oriental culture;2) Practically, it provides people with a new approach and theoretical guidanceto the appreciation and moral interpretation of ironical cartoons, from which the artteaching will benefit a lot.