A Read into the Pictorial Metaphors of Hamshahri Newspaper in the Environmental Crisis of Tehran Metropolis

Abstract

"Water shortage" and "air pollution" are two environmental crises threatening Tehran metropolis, and have caused lots of problems for the citizens. The question is which organization is responsible to investigate these issues? Is it the Environment Protection Agency, the mass media, or the cognitive linguistics? It seems none of them can resolve the problem by themselves, and the interdisciplinary studies are needed in order to analyze the crises from different point of views. So, during this article, we attempted to describe and analyze those visual Images in Hamshahri newspaper (2015) that their main concern was environmental crises. The main question of our study was: "How do the visual images help to reduce the environmental crises using the pictorial metaphors approach (Forceville, 2016)?" The main assumption of the approach was "if there is not any major contrast between the main elements of the approach and the main elements of the visual images in the Hamshahri newspaper, the visual images of the newspaper will have the capability of being received by the readers". In this case, the designers of the visual images will accomplish their goals -reducing the environmental crises. If not, it is necessary some fundamental changes to be done. The study was descriptive- analytic, and most times its results were in line with Forceville (2016). In general, it was concluded that the pictorial metaphors in Hamshahri newspaper had the capability of being understood by the readers. So, the designers accomplished their main goal - reducing the environmental crises.

Keywords

• "air pollution"
• "cognitive linguistics"
• "visual images"
• "water shortage"