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The UTokyo STIG 52nd PoP Seminar: Multimodal Fusion as a Cognitive Mechanism of Interpreting Political Cartoons: Debates on U.S. Beef Imports into Taiwan

January 5, 2017

Details

Type Lecture
Intended for General public / Enrolled students / International students / Companies / University students
Date(s) January 6, 2017 18:00 — 19:30
Location Hongo Area Campus
Venue  610 meeting room, 6F, Administration Bureau Bldg. 2, Hongo Campus (close to Tatsuoka Gate), The University of Tokyo
Capacity 20 people
Entrance Fee No charge
Registration Method Advance registration required
Send email to: STIG☆pp.u-tokyo.ac.jp (replace☆→@) with: a) Name; b) Institution.
Contact Science, Technology, and Innovation Governance (STIG), The University of Tokyo
STIG☆pp.u-tokyo.ac.jp (replace☆→@)

Speaker: Tiffany Ying-Yu Lin, Distinguished Postdoctoral Scholar, Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica

Abstract:
Political cartoons are not only a form of media that conveys complex ideological messages but also the multimodal genre that vividly combines the visual mode, verbal mode, and conceptual mode of metaphor and metonymy. This study proposes a multimodal fusion model as the cognitive mechanism of political cartoon analysis. Our multimodal corpus includes 56 political cartoons concerning U.S. beef import issues in two dominant Taiwanese newspapers, the Liberty Times and United Daily News. Our analysis demonstrates that multimodal fusion is a significant and recurrent representation technique in the genre of political cartoons, which have the cognitive function of encapsulating the abstract complex political debates efficiently with irony and humorous effect. The findings highlight the important role of metonymy, showing how metonymies and metaphors are interwoven in the process of multimodal fusion. This study indicates that although the critical messages and distinct stances of political cartoons in two newspapers both emerge through multimodal fusion, they are highlighted and contrasted through prominent visual features and verbal context shown in the cartoons.
 

  • Tiffany Ying-Yu Lin, Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica>
    Tiffany Ying-Yu Lin, Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica

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