Attitudinal-meaning Construction Of Lega LCartoons

Public legal education(PLE)discourse falls within the scope of forensic linguistic studies.Owing to the rapid development of science and technology,diverse new media have sprung up continuously,which enriches the means of PLE immensely and renders PLE discourse multimodal.As a convenient and practical means of PLE,legal cartoons are worthy of study.Considering the multi-modality nature of such data,multimodal discourse analysis(MDA)might be the more suitable approach.Mainly drawing on Martin's appraisal theory(both verbal and visual appraisal)and Martinec's status and logico-semantic theory,the present author constructs an analytical framework to probe into 30 outstanding legal cartoons sampled from the official websites of PLE and explore what semiotic resources in both verbal text and visual image are employed to construct attitudinal meanings,text-image relations therein,and how these cartoons of different image-text relations construct the whole attitudinal meaning.The major findings are as follows:(1)In sampled legal cartoons,verbal attitudinal resources have three sources —titles,notes and dialogues;so does the visual ones — facial expressions,gestures and stances,and visual ideational tokens or metaphors.These attitudinal resources can inscribe,provoke or afford the values of affect,judgement and appreciation except appreciation cannot be inscribed in visual images.Specifically,affect values are most commonly constructed by facial expressions while judgement and appreciation ones most frequently by visual ideational tokens or metaphors.(2)The status relation between image and text in legal cartoons can be divided into three types,i.e.,text is subordinate to image,image is subordinate to text and image is complementary to text,which means image-text-independent relation israre or nonexistent at least in sampled legal cartoons.Among the three types of status relations in legal cartoons,image-text-complementary relation is the most common one followed by the relation of text-subordinate-to-image,while image-subordinate-to-text relation is the least common type.The logico-semantic relation in the latter two types of legal cartoons is generally an extension and that in the most common type tends to be an elaboration though a locution(wording),an idea(meaning)or an enhancement may occur in certain cartoons.(3)In the vast majority of sampled legal cartoons,both verbal text and visual image convey certain attitudes in varying degrees to construct the whole attitudinal meaning.As for several legal cartoons,verbal text is employed to name the corresponding visual ideational tokens or visual image is depicted to represent the corresponding verbal ideational tokens though they may not construct attitudinal meanings directly.In other words,both verbal text and visual image of each legal cartoon are indispensable for better evoking legal awareness or shared legal attitude in viewers because the effective construction of the whole attitudinal meaning requires necessary or vivid depiction by both of them.The present study has extended the scope of application of appraisal theory as well as status and logico-semantic theory by virtue of MDA of legal cartoons as an approach to PLE.It is expected to shed some light on future research on PLE discourse from the perspective of MDA.In addition,the findings of the present research will be conducive to the practical production of legal cartoons,which will better serve the aim of PLE.