Emotional parliamentary lions: Evaluative metonymic complexes in editorial cartoons

Abstract

Various cognitive linguistic studies (e.g., Riad & Vaara, 2011; Riad, 2019; cf. Feng, 2017) indicate that the conceptual metonymy national building for the institutional leadership or a population can emotively frame activities and facilitate the creation of stereotypes and political attitudes. The article reconsiders this assessment by evaluating a multimodal corpus of editorial cartoons that depict the parliamentary lions that are usually personified and express emotions to voice different positions. Fifty-one editorial cartoons were retrieved from Hungarian dailies and coded according to their political topics, the related emotions they depict and the tropes (metonymy, metaphor, and irony), as well as their evaluative functions. Overall, the compression of part for the whole and member for category metonymies occurs; thus, the parliamentary lions stand for the Hungarian parliament that stands for politicians/the government or the people/the minority. These emotionally saturated metonymies cooperate with metaphorical and ironical processes by supporting the identification of those whose voice can be heard, but at the same time it also reduces the responsibility of the persons or the group hidden in the form of the lion.