A Pragmatic Study of Visual Metaphor in Social Media Political Caricatures during the Iran-U.S. Conflict: A Relevance Theory Perspective

With the military and political events between Iran and U.S., social media is a prominent platform to express political messages and biases by political memes and caricatures. This study aims to investigate the impact of visual metaphor on public opinion related to the Iran-U.S. conflict in political caricatures through social media. In this study, the focus is set on four types of visual metaphor, mono-modal and multi-modal metaphors from each type have been selected to study how visual metaphor is used except the last type making a total of seven samples. To investigate visual metaphor, a qualitative research has been carried out within the theoretical framework that put by Forceville (2013). The samples have been analyzed pragmatically focusing on relevance theory perspective to investigate the type of visual metaphor and to reveal the hidden message in each sample.