Metaphors in editorial cartoons representing the global financial crisis

Abstract

Lakoff and Johnson claim that metaphors play a crucial role in systematically structuring concepts, not just language. Probing the validity of this far-reaching claim requires an investigation of multimodal discourse. In this article, the authors analyse the 25 metaphors that structure a sample of 30 political cartoons pertaining to the global financial crisis that hit the world in 2008, and find that certain source domains recur systematically. They examine the role of visual and verbal modalities and argue that metaphors are manifestations of underlying conceptual ones. In the service of future research pertaining to multimodal metaphor and multimodal discourse, the authors also reflect on the methodological problems they encountered, and on the decisions they took to solve them.