British and American Political Cartoons in Sociocultural Context

This research is set in the framework of sociolinguistics and employs the Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis. The article contains the contrastive analysis of British and American political cartoons that are viewed as multimodal texts embedded in social and cultural landscapes. To shape their messages the authors employ verbal, iconic, graphical and colour codes which interact with each other and broad contexts building intersemiotic and intertextual ties. So far these aspects haven’t been studied in regard to different variants of one and the same language. The present research aims to fill this gap in modern scholarship. The sample includes 150 British and 150 American political cartoons published by The Guardian and US Today in 2020-2021. The analysis of British and American cartoons reveals that their authors tend to use similar resources to make the cartoons appealing, such as grotesque, visual metaphor, bisociation and periphrasis. The difference lies in their employment of the graphical mode. British cartoonists use it to express different prosodic features, to allude to some musical context, which makes British cartoons more polyphonic than American ones. The research also revealed marked differences in sources of intertextuality that encompass national symbols, historical background, symbols of power. However, both British and American cartoons tend to draw on similar elements of world cultural heritage, using Bible as a prior text.