Visual metaphor and metonymy in Frenc political cartoons

In the last thirty years the development of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory has led to a great amount of research into metaphor. Although the research focus has been on verbal metaphor, other types of metaphor such as pictorial metaphor (i.e. metaphor occurring in pictures) and multimodal metaphor (i.e. metaphor occurring in diverse modes) have been investigated. In contrast, metonymy has attracted less attention, and its presence in specialized genres has not been considered. The present contribution provides a corpus-based analysis of visual metaphors and metonymies in French political cartoons by Plantu. The following issues are addressed: (i) description of the image shown in the cartoon; (ii) identification of the metaphors and metonymies in terms of target and source; and (iii) the interaction between metaphor and metonymy. It is argued that metaphor and metonymy play a central role in the interpretation of political cartoons.