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Part of
Discourse Studies in Public Communication
Edited by Eliecer Crespo-Fernández
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 92] 2021
► pp. 59–82

Chapter 3
National vs international cartoons depicting Catalonia’s independence process in the press

A critical multimodal metaphor approach

ORCID logo | Universidad Autónoma de Madrid , Spain

Given the key role played by political metaphors in multimodal discourse, the objective of the study is twofold: first, to contrast the main source domains used by the national and the international press in a sample of political cartoons depicting Catalonia’s independence process (September-November 2017). Second, to critically analyse the political and cultural (mis)conceptions behind the cartoons and their potential implications on the international audience’s perception of Spain. This study draws upon the groundings of Kress and van Leeuwen’s multimodal critical discourse analysis and Charteris-Black’s critical metaphor analysis in order to address Critical Multimodal Metaphor Analysis. The results show relevant differences in terms of source choice by the international vs. national press, since the former makes use of sources that are absent in the later, and vice versa. This study supports the claim of a critical multimodal metaphor analysis to examine political metaphors in multimodal communication.

Keywords: pictorial metaphor, critical multimodal metaphor analysis, political cartoons, Catalonia’s independence process, contrastive studies
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Metaphor in politics and the media discourse
  • 3.Critical metaphor studies: Towards a multimodal metaphor core
  • 4.Political and social background: Catalonia’s independence process
  • 5.Data and methodology
  • 6.Results and discussion
    • 6.1Metaphor identification, annotation, and interpretation
    • 6.2Metaphor explanation and implications
  • 7.Conclusions and further steps
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 7 April 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.92.03mue
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