Metaphoric moral framing and image-text relations in the op-ed genre

Abstract

This article examines the role of visual metaphor for moral-political cognition. It makes use of a large corpus of 250 multimodal op-eds about the Euro crisis and lays the foundation for establishing a general system of image-text relations in the op-ed genre. Specifically, the paper addresses the following questions: Is there a difference between a cartoon and an illustration? Why do not op-ed illustrations have captions? What role does layout play in conveying meaning? How do ‘op-ed’ and ‘illustration’ relate to each other in terms of the metaphors and moral values employed in both of them? What is the nature of the relationship between the two? How does the illustrating process work? Should the text and image be considered as a single unit or as two separate (though related) units? Moreover, the results of this research will show that visual metaphors can exert a strong effect on individuals’ moral-political cognition.