Metaphorical Scenarios And Frame In Brexit Political Cartoons:a Perspective Of Conceptual Blending

Political cartoons,involving two modes of language and image,are a metaphor rich communicative area and a format that simplifies the complex political situation and these plentiful metaphors can support the function of comment,clarification and evaluation.Its specialty lies in that it brings people visual impact in its imaginary scenarios which make a huge contrast compared with those in reality.Political cartoons have been a hot research object for scholars.For decades,scholars have studied the aspects of metaphors and metonymys,the conceptual blending mechanism and discourse features from a cognitive approach.However,the attention for social and cultural factors are not strong and the data for typical research are not enough in political cartoons.This thesis aims to solve these problems based on interdisciplinary study.This study examines how Brexit is framed in political cartoons and especially it examines what types of metaphorical scenarios(Musolff,2006)and frames are chosen before and after referendum in these political cartoons.Recently,as the Britain exited from the EU,a large amount of political cartoons have come forth,providing a large amount of corpus for research.For the 100 cartoons in the self-built corpus,the conceptual blending network of Fauconnier and Turner(2002),is adapted into the metaphor-frame blending model for analysis.This framework provides a conceptual integration model that combines the chosen metaphorical scenarios with frames to visualize the organization of cartoons.Through the analysis of metaphorical scenario,the function of frame is prominent and after the frame is identified,the incongruity and critical stance is expressed.There are three main findings in this thesis.Firstly,there are four main scenarios including life scenario,journey scenario,conflict scenario,and game/competition scenario,and six frames including conflict frame,human interest frame,responsibility frame,economic consequences frame,morality frame and dilemma frame.The former five are identified based on the five frames put forward by Semetko and Valkenburg(2002)through deductive approach and the last frame is identified by the inductive approach in the light of its regular and stable distribution.The life(35)and journey(33)are the dominant scenarios and the conflict(27)and responsibility(17)are dominant frames.And it is found that there exists asubtle difference among scenarios but visible differences among frames before and after Brexit.Secondly,before Brexit,the dominant scenario and frame are journey scenario(19)and conflict frame(17),which lies in that before referendum,more focuses are put into the potential risks after Brexit and the beneficial disputes achieve a summit.And journey is the optimum model for presenting the unknown risks and also provides viewers with various impressed visual effect.In terms of frequency,the conflict frame is followed by the dilemma frame(10)and the morality frame(7);the human interest frame(6)and the economic consequences frame(5)are used less.After Brexit,the dominant scenario and frame has changed into the life scenario(14)and responsibility frame(12).Because after Brexit,it is impossible to develop smoothly as it expected especially in a situation in which the votes of Brexit for “stay” and “leave” are in narrow gap,thus it triggers questions related to who is responsible for the new problems and solving it then excellent leaders should assume the responsibility to lead the country forward then cartoonists use more responsibility frame to shape their stance.And the life scenario is used most for there may exists various difficulties and tests in the situation of Britain without EU as in life.In terms of frequency,in this period,the responsibility frame is followed by the conflict frame(11)and the economic consequences frame(10)while the human interest frame(7),the morality frame(5)and the dilemma frame(3)are used less.Thirdly,the integration of two frames,superficial frame and underlying frame in the pretence space interact with each other to express critical stance in the cartoon.This is done through the incongruities in the cartoon between inter-frame contradiction and intra-frame contradiction in relation to metaphorical scenarios.The former is expressed through the different frames while the latter is expressed through the opposite vales or mismatch between imaginary and reality scenes.