Multimodal conceptual patterns of Hungary in political cartoons

Abstract

Conventionalized positive images of Hungary have been overemphasized in political caricatures ever since the nineteenth century (Tamás 2012, 2014). The present chapter explores the multimodal representations of hungary in cartoons in the period between 1989 and 1990, during which negative images of Hungary became prominent due to the weak financial situation of the country and the political system change. The corpus involves seventyfive cartoons from the satirical magazine Ludas Matyi. Two major claims are justified by adopting Paula Pérez-Sobrino’s (2017) multimodal identification procedure: (1) the interpretation of verbal elements (e.g., labels, verbal texts, and verbal symbols) in political cartoons influences the identification of multimodal conceptual patterns; (2) the dominant patterns that structure the representation of hungary in political cartoons are metonymy-based visual and multimodal metaphors, and both of them occur in metaphorical scenarios. The corpus analysis indicates that the two main target frames, financial crisis and political changes, appear through the sources of human body and object in metaphorical scenarios, such as ordinary scenes, motion, hospital, sport, tale, love, feast, stunt, begging, and church scenes. Apart from identifying the representations of Hungary, visual metonymies as well as textual cues need to be revealed in order to understand what metaphtonymy scenarios are intended in the cartoons.