Beggary behind the Closed Door of United Nations Security Council; Conceptual Metaphor, Metonymy and Blending in Political Cartoons

Political cartoons are powerful and effective tools that serve to express the political concepts and views. They use cognitive mechanisms of conceptual metaphor, metonymy and blending abundantly. For the past eight years, ‘JCPOA’ has been the most important issue in Iran's foreign policy, which has also been widely reflected in domestic political cartoons. One of the issues that became a dispute between the United States and other countries member of “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” (JCPOA), in 2020 is the “Trigger Mechanism”. In the present research, two political cartoons on the subject of trigger mechanism from Tasnim News Agency have been extracted and investigated within the framework of three theories of Conceptual Metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Lakoff, 1993), Multimodal Metaphor (Forceville, 1996, 2006, 2009) and Conceptual Blending (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002). The results of the study show that one of the cartoons is formed around the conceptual blending of two mental spaces of “beggary” and “activation of the trigger mechanism”, while the other is based on metaphor “THE TRIGGER MECHANISM IS A GUN”. In addition to conceptual metaphor and blending, two basic conceptual metonymies are also found in cartoons: One is “PERSON FOR COUNTRY/ GOVERNMENT” and the other is “PLACE FOR INSTITUTION/ ORGANIZATION”. Using these cognitive mechanisms, the cartoonist portrays Trump and his government’s attempt to activate the trigger mechanism as a desperate effort that is doomed to failure.