Cognitive-discursive methodology of american multimodal texts analysis

Abstract

The article under discussion describes the analysis US creolized (multimodal) texts. Besides the analysis of the structure and content of a creolized text this allows you to investigate the pragmatic potential of political cartoons. In the introduction the authors focus on the importance of taking into account a complex synthesis of creolized texts compositional elements (verbal and non-verbal). In the main part the authors describe the methodology which includes several stages of the above-mentioned components analysis. In terms of political cartoon description, the authors distinguish the following key methods: extended definitional analysis and stylistic analysis of language units, the method of establishing precedent connections on the basis of different sources of information and cognitive modelling by means of cognitive scenes. As the research material the authors use political cartoons featuring the main presidential candidates D. Trump (a Republican nominee) and H. Clinton (a Democratic nominee). This article concentrates on the detailed analysis of political cartoons, which were thematically and conceptually united in such cognitive scenes as “INFANTILISM”, “ZOOMORPHISMS”, “NAZISM”, “MANIPULATION”, “FRAUD”. The authors lay emphasis on some novelty elements of this methodology due to the holistic description of formal and semantic components in multimodal texts and the identification of the pragmatic potential. In conclusion, the article states the wide sphere of this methodology application: demotivators, comics, posters, internet memes and other kinds of creolized (multimodal) texts.