[1月6日]The 52nd STIG PoP Seminar: Multimodal Fusion as a Cognitive Mechanism of Interpreting Political Cartoons: Debates on U.S. Beef Imports into Taiwan
Speaker: Tiffany Ying-Yu Lin, Distinguished Postdoctoral Scholar, Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica
Political cartoon is not only the media that conveys complex ideological messages but also the multimodal genre that vividly combines the visual mode, verbal mode, and conceptual mode of metaphor and metonymy. This study proposes a multimodal fusion model as the cognitive mechanism of political cartoon analysis. Our multimodal corpus includes 56 political cartoons concerning U.S. beef import issues in two dominant Taiwanese newspapers, the Liberty Times and United Daily News. Our analysis demonstrates multimodal fusion is a significant and recurrent representation technique in the genre of political cartoon, which has the cognitive function of encapsulating the abstract complex political debates efficiently with irony and humorous effect. The findings highlight the important role of metonymy, showing how metonymies and metaphors are interwoven in the process of multimodal fusion. This study indicates that although the critical messages and distinct stances of political cartoons in two newspapers both emerge through multimodal fusion, they are highlighted and contrasted through prominent visual features and verbal context shown in the cartoons.
