Lakoff and Johnson claim that metaphors play a crucial role in systematically structuring concepts, not just language. Probing the validity of this far-reaching claim requires an investigation of multimodal discourse. In this article, the authors analyse the 25 metaphors that structure a sample of 30 political cartoons pertaining to the global financial crisis that hit the world in 2008, and find that certain source domains recur systematically. They examine the role of visual and verbal modalities and argue that metaphors are manifestations of underlying conceptual ones. In the service of future research pertaining to multimodal metaphor and multimodal discourse, the authors also reflect on the methodological problems they encountered, and on the decisions they took to solve them.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.