Thesis (MA (General Linguistics))--University of Stellenbosch, 2009. / According to Nattrass (2007:138), the denial and questioning of the science of HIV/AIDS
at government level by, amongst others, Thabo Mbeki (former State President) and Manto
Tshabalala-Msimang (former Minister of Health) resulted in an estimated 343 000
preventable AIDS deaths in South Africa by 2007. Such governmental discourse of AIDS
denialism has been the target of criticism in the media and by activist groups such as the
Treatment Action Campaign. This study investigates the nature of this criticism,
specifically considering the critical use of metaphor in visual texts such as the political
cartoons of Jonathan Shapiro, who works under the pen name of “Zapiro”. The purpose is
to determine whether the nature of the criticism in visual newspaper texts differs from that
of corresponding verbal newspaper texts, possibly providing means of criticism not
available to the verbal mode alone.
A corpus of texts published between August 1999 and December 2007 that topicalise
HIV/AIDS was investigated. This includes 119 cartoons by Zapiro, and 91 verbal articles in
the weekly newspaper Mail & Guardian. The main theoretical approach used in the analyses
is Conceptual Metaphor Theory, developed by Lakoff and Johnson (1981), and its extension
to poetic metaphor, developed by Lakoff and Turner (1989). Because of the socio-political
nature of the problem of HIV/AIDS, the study also draws on Critical Discourse Analysis,
including complementary concepts from Systemic Functional Linguistics.
The study reveals that visual and verbal texts make use of similar sets of conventional
conceptual metaphors at similar frequencies, which confirms the predictions of Conceptual
Metaphor Theory. The study further reveals that the cartoons enrich these metaphors
through four specific mechanisms of poetic metaphor, which the verbal articles do not. This
indicates a significant difference between the two types of texts. Furthermore, it is found
that the use of such poetic metaphors directly contributes to the critical power of the
political cartoons. The study indicates that multi-modality in cartoons, which triggers single
metaphoric mappings, adds a dimension to the critical function of the text that is absent in
the verbal equivalent. The finding that the visual texts enable a form of cognition that is not
available to verbal texts, poses one of the most significant avenues for future research.
Thus, cartoons apparently achieve a type of criticism that is not found, and may not be
possible, in the verbal texts alone. This makes the political cartoon a text type with an
important and unique ability to articulate political criticism.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:sun/oai:scholar.sun.ac.za:10019.1/1653 |
| Date | 03 1900 |
| Creators | Nothnagel, Ignatius |
| Contributors | Anthonissen, Christine, University of Stellenbosch. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of General Linguistics. |
| Publisher | Stellenbosch : University of Stellenbosch |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | University of Stellenbosch, Dissertations -- Linguistics, Theses -- Linguistics |
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