Conceptual Operations in Multimodal Political Humor

Abstract

This paper examines how different construals realized in semiotic modes create humor in Persian multimodal political discourse. The paper also elucidates the mechanisms of intersemiotic relations between images and linguistic items in political humor. To this end, humorous multimodal texts from a Persian political news website were analyzed. The results show that although conceptual mappings of type metaphor, metonymy, or metaphtonymy are the most prominent Logical Mechanisms in humorous political co-text images, various conceptual operations help to convey a comical sense. These conceptualization strategies include schematization through different image schemas, framing through different categorizations, identification through profiling different aspects of the scene, and positioning through realizing different points of view. Moreover, unlike other multimodal news texts, divergence rather than convergence better explains the intersemiotic link between the two modes in this discourse genre. The findings reveal some promising potentials of the cognitive approach to multimodal discourse studies.

Keywords

• cognitive linguistics
• conceptual operations
• political discourse
• humor
• multimodality