Conceptual Metaphor and Blending in Critical Discourse Analysis of Iran’s Political Cartoons

Cartoons are media tools published in many newspapers, magazines, Internet news websites and even virtual networks on various fields and themes. They play an important role in expressing and mediating different political, social, economic and cultural concepts. Conceptual metaphor and blending, as cognitive processes and communicative-discursive tools, are frequently used in cartoons. These metaphors are often pictorial or verbal-pictorial. The present study investigated a sample of political cartoons published in Fars news agency based on the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), Multimodal Metaphor Theory (Forceville, 1994, 1996, 2009) and Conceptual Blending (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002). The aim of the study is to analyze the role and importance of conceptual metaphor and blending in political cartoons to determine how cognitive, communicative and discursive aspects of metaphors interact with each other in these cartoons. The results of the research show that the metaphor ‘JCPOA is a patient’ adopted from Hassan Rouhani’s speech may give rise to several conceptual mappings between the two conceptual spaces of ‘surgery room’ and ‘JCPOA agreement’ and the argumentative function of this metaphor may well justify Iran's decision to reduce its commitments under JCPOA.