الفهرس 
IntroductionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
 |  | from | 279 |  |  |
| | | from | 279 | | |
Abstract
Political caricature plays a major role in communicative discourse concerning serious and important issues. This dissertation presents a semiotic social analysis of political caricature using the framework of Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006). Analyzing the semiotic features in cartoons demonstrates real interaction and helps in realizing entertainment and satire. The study investigates how meaning is constructed in political caricature published during the period between 2016 and early 2018.Political caricatures merge both visual and verbal phrases together to incite various responses from the viewers. Actually, it is a photograph inclosing a propaganda message related to current events or celebrities. Cartoonists launch various cartoons (also called caricatures) to depict political events to convey their voices to the globe. We are devoted in this study to inspect how language and image interaction encodes and decodes meanings through investigating textual and visual contents of political cartoons. The major semiotic tools used for the task of analysis are those of Kress and Van Leeuwen’s model of Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (2006): connotation and denotation, rhetorical tropes, modality, and the three visual semiotic metafunctions; representational, interpersonal and compositional.It is crucial to say that this study is not intended to propose or establish rules that would become a model; rather it is merely an attempt to elucidate and suggest the theoretical and practical framework of Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006) while examining various types of verbal and non-verbal sign interaction. This study contributes to our understanding of political cartoons as a communicative tool and specifically how cartoons are used to establish dominant political themes. This complex process depends on both the viewers’ interpretation and the whole media “ecosystem” surrounding the cartoons.