Conceptual mappings in political cartoons: A comparative study of the case of nuclear crises in US–North Korean relations

Abstract

This paper aims to provide a cognitive semantic account of the construal of multimodality by conducting a comparative case study of political cartoons on the US–North Korea nuclear crises in two eras. It focuses on how conceptual metaphors and conceptual blends contribute to different meaning constructions in each era's sub-set of the data. Specifically, the paper looks at two groups of political cartoons published in English that contain images of the political leaders of the US and North Korea and that deal with nuclear weapons: those published before US President Donald Trump took office, and those published after. Seventy-eight cartoons that address the relationship between the two nations by situating images of political figures in certain events (e.g., dueling, having drinks together, etc.) were collected from a total of 600 (accessed Jan. 10, 2018) found via a Google image search. The analysis finds that the two groups of cartoons differ in entailments regarding the power relationship between the two nations: the first group frames as negligible North Korea's efforts to develop nuclear weapons and reifies the situation in terms of two people of radically different physical strengths. The second group frames the two nations as equally competent, illustrating seriously escalating tensions over the issue of North Korea's development of nuclear weapons. This study, based on its qualitative and comparative analysis within a cognitive semantics framework, argues that cognitive mechanisms such as conceptual metaphor and blending help effectively convey different viewpoints for the two groups of cartoons, which directly reflect different stances toward the relationship between the two nations in the different eras.