A Pragmatic Study of Political Cartoons in Al-Ahram Weekly Newspaper
Authors: Abdel-Tawwab Sharaf Eldin Ahmad 
Published: June 2022

During the past century, political cartoons were considered as the most extreme form of expression in newspapers, as they were not committed to any norm of journalistic objectivity, or even the domain of objective reality. Some cartoonists consider political cartoons as historical sources of satirical critique of the political status quo. Generally speaking, there are various forms of cartoons, such as political, social, and humorous cartoons. Each one has a different function.

The function of political cartoons lies in making a real change in a society in favor of suppressed classes through criticizing the status quo and unjust practices in political life. In addition, cartoons help newspapers and magazines look better by taking some space among columns of words which might be boring for the reader. At the same time, political cartoons have real contributions in affirming the role newspapers play as means of communication between a reader and a cartoonist. Political cartoons are also capable of bold dealing with different societal problems as they can escape different types of censorship. Thus, political cartoons have the mechanisms to correct the negatives of a society faster than written words, especially they are easily understood by readers.

As cartoons are viewed as methods of communication, pragmatics is also concerned with determining the elements of communicational content, which are essential to interpretation. It is quite common for an utterance to display a number of pragmatic features. Hence, it is clear that pragmatics plays a key role in the interpretation of the communication process represented by the cartoons' language. This communication process, whether verbal or non-verbal, includes expressions and recognition of intentions. From this perspective, pragmatic interpretation is simply an exercise in which a reader infers a cartoonist’s intended meaning from his cartoon.

Within this framework, this study tries to discuss the aspects of the implicit meanings in the language of political cartoons. The importance of the study is obviously shown by shedding light on the role of the language that can be employed to convey explicit and also implicit meaning by pragmatic devices. This study, therefore, attempts to clarify the role of pragmatic devices in explaining the hidden meaning in political cartoons.  In doing so, it tries to emphasize the importance of implicature in the language of political cartoons, whether it abides or flouts Gricean’s maxims with its effect to convey the meaning. Also, it attempts to figure out why cartoonists frequently use this aspect of pragmatics in writing the language. Another goal of this study is to explain the role of speech acts, whether used directly or indirectly, and why a cartoonist sometimes uses the literal and sometimes prefers to use non-literal speech acts.

Moreover, this study underscores the importance of the distinction between language use and linguistic meaning. Besides, it asserts a parallel distinction between speaker's reference and linguistic reference, which provokes the assumption to what extent linguistic expressions refer independently to speaker's use of them. In addition, this thesis attempts to consider the politeness phenomenon as a pragmatic device, and its role in understanding the meaning. 

Given the distance between a cartoonist and his addressees, this study sheds light on how language users sometimes depart from the conditions of optimal information exchange which may cause confusion.  In addition, this thesis emphasizes the function of deictic expressions and the role of presupposition with its relation to the implicature. In short, it shows the linguistic insights of implicit meanings employed in cartoons and attempts to discover whether or not cartoonists succeed in conveying the meaning to the addressees by employing pragmatic devices.