Linguistic study about contextual dimensions of political caricature

Abstract

Cartoons are one of the most popular journalistic genres in recent decades, combining irony, humor and satire to analyze the relevant facts of a country. Discourse analysis allows establishing a joint relationship between social and cognitive reality in this type of text. This research aims to analyze, from a pragmatic approach, the discourse of Eduardo Sanabria's political cartoon about the 2017 electoral contest in Venezuela under a qualitative approach and descriptive-exploratory design. The analysis of the discourse is the technique used. The corpus was made up of five cartoons published in the newspaper El Nacional days before the elections and whose central topic is limited to the call for elections.  The analysis identified the contexts: iconic-linguistic, situational and socio-cultural. Speech acts and rhetorical figures were identified as discursive strategies aimed at evidencing the intentionality of an ostensive communication such as caricature. The contributions of the Theory of Relevance (Sperber & Wilson, 2004) and the Theory of Speech Acts (Austin, 2016; Searle, 2017) were taken into account. A macro-act of illocutionary speech such as the call to vote is evidenced. It is concluded that the discourse of the Sanabria cartoons expresses the criticism of the electoral event from the game of the implicit, discursively constructed between the iconic-linguistic, the rhetorical component and the context, establishing a relationship of complicity with the reader.