Firstly, this paper aims to analyze how verbal and visual modes contribute to build two basic components of cartoons: the referenced situation and the fictional situation. Secondly, it aims to unravel the semiotics of this discursive genre by offering a fine-grained picture of modal variations and continuities of the rhetorical resources deployed, by means of which the fictional situation is displayed. The corpus is composed of 50 multimodal cartoons chosen by cartoonists of 22 nationalities as the most representative of their (...) work in the frame of a wide questionnaire. Category analysis and non-parametric statistics were applied. We identified and fleshed out four different types of modal functioning of resources: visual preference, verbal preference, modal flexibility, and genuine multimodal functioning. Even if visual and multimodal metaphor were often in charge of transferring meaning from fiction to the referenced situation, results show that other resources such as antithesis, irony, and syllepsis can become the key resources of cartoons. Findings highlight the multilayered functioning of cartoons, among which plastic features can play a significant role, and provide further evidence in favor of the hyperdetermination of humor hypothesis proposed by Attardo. (shrink)

IntroductionIf we were to identify the beginning of the study of visual argumentation, we would have to choose 1996 as the starting point. This was the year that Leo Groarke published “Logic, art and argument” in Informal logic, and it was the year that he and David Birdsell co-edited a special double issue of Argumentation and Advocacy on visual argumentation . Among other papers, the issue included Anthony Blair’s “The possibility and actuality of visual arguments”. It was also the year (...) that Gail J. Chryslee, Sonja K. Foss and Arthur L. Ranney published their short text on “The construction of claims in visual argumentation” , stating that even though theorists may know a great deal about the process of argumentation, “virtually none of this knowledge is applicable to visual argumentation […] because of the properties that distinguish visual imagery from discursive symbols” .Texts on visual rhetoric have been written as far back as the early 1980s, .. (shrink)