Pragma-Semiotic Analysis of Iraqi Parliamentary Election Campaign Billboards: A Multimodal Approach

This study analyzes the electoral billboards used by candidates during (2018) Iraqi parliamentary elections, and investigates their semiotic designs, implicit meanings and their influence on voters’ insight. The candidates utilized these billboards as an effective tool in their electoral campaigns. The data of the study constitute (50) arbitrarily chosen billboards. The study attempts to identify the strategies utilized by candidates in designing their billboards. It provides a pragmatic and multimodal analysis of the slogans employed in the billboards. Searle's (1979) speech act theory has been exploited to realize the messages that candidates intend to convey to their voters. In addition, Kress and van Leeuwen's (2006) multimodal perspective is adopted to analyze the design of the billboards. It is hypothesized that the candidates adopt varied communicative strategies in their electoral billboards, exploiting linguistic and visual-grammar framework. The results reveal that the candidates employed (6) strategies that communicate different implications. It has also been shown that they highly prefer using white and blue colors in creating their billboards. Their crafting of slogans tends to be concise and phrasing, yet bear effective messages. The results also show that the most recurring kinds of speech acts utilized in the electoral slogans are representative and expressive which either convey implicit meanings of promising or asserting. Additionally, it has been concluded that the visual components including images, symbols, and wording interact with the slogans in order to produce significant messages targeting at impacting the voter’s attitude.