A Comparative Study Of Chinese And American Political Cartoons From A Perspective Of Multimodal Discourse Analysis

As a special multi-modal discourse,political cartoons are usually made up of images and texts.And they play important roles in newspapers,magazines,and other multimodal media by using some exaggerated,sarcastic and artistic techniques to comment on special people and events.Therefore,it is of increasingly great importance to conduct multimodal analysis of political cartoons and explore the cultural factors behind them.As representatives of developing countries and developed countries in modern times,China and America have different political cartoons because of their own different cultural background.The author chooses 50 political cartoons featuring the images of Xi Jinping(the Chinese President)and Obama(the former American President)respectively for each country as research objects.With a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods,the author employs Halliday's Systemic-functional Grammar and Kress and van Leeuwen's Visual Grammar as a theoretical basis to construct a multimodal discourse analysis of Chinese and American political cartoons with the aim to answer the following three questions: 1.How does verbal and visual modality in Chinese and American political cartoons construct meaning? 2.What are the similarities and differences in the process of meaning construction between Chinese and American political cartoons? 3.What are the reasons for similarities and differences in meaning construction between Chinese and American political cartoons?This research finds that: firstly,as the visual mode,the impersonal function is realized by mood,modality and person system.The ideational function and textual function are not obvious.The similarities lie in that declarative,low and median value modal operator and the first person system are widely used in both Chinese and American political cartoons to make these cartoons become less impulsive,objective and real,which are easily accepted by viewers.The differences are Chinese political cartoons employ more high value modal operators and the third person while American political cartoons favor more low value modal operators,the second person,interrogatives and imperatives,which results from the cultural differences between two countries.While Chinese political cartoons is influenced by the Confucian culture and collectivism,the American political cartoons is inspired by Marine culture and individualism.Secondly,as for visual mode,the representational meaning is represented by narrative process and conceptual process.The interactive meaning is constructed by contact,social distance,perspective and modality.The compositional meaning is mainly realized by information value and salience.The similarities lie in that the narrative process,the eye-level angle and the high modality are mostly frequently adopted in both Chinese and American political cartoons to shorten the distance between the represented participants and the viewers,build equal relationship between them,and form color contrast so as to realize a better visual effect.The differences are that Chinese political cartoons use more “demand” acts,frontal angle and close and medium shot while American political cartoons take more “offer” act,oblique angle and long shot,which is related to different thinking modes and power distance between two countries.