Pictorial Metaphor in Citizen Cartoons: A Case Study on Environmental Issue

The aim of this research is to investigate the role of pictorial metaphors in expressing and conveying the message of citizenship cartoons. To achieve this goal, in the form of a case study, seven cartoons published in Persian-language websites were extracted and analyzed in the framework of conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999; Lakoff, 1993) and multimodal metaphor theory (Forceville, 1996; 2008; 2009). The subject of all these cartoons is ‘the environment’ and the main question of the research is what conceptual metaphors and what pictorial metaphors have been used to express the importance and necessity of environmental protection and what are the source and target domains of these metaphors? The results show that cartoons are divided into two categories in terms of their source domain. In one category, the source domain refers to negative and unpleasant concepts (such as smoke and garbage), and their underlying conceptual metaphor is ‘pollution is death’. In the other category, the source domain refers to positive and pleasant concepts (such as respiratory aids) and is based on the conceptual metaphor of ‘tree is life’. Thus, the conceptual contrast between the tree and pollution on the one hand, and between the concepts of life and death on the other, form the main basis of the cartoons message.