A Linguistic Study of Political Cartoons in Egyptian Newspaper

Political cartoons are considered as the most extreme form of expression in newspapers, as they are not committed to any norm of journalistic objectivity, or even the domain of objective reality. 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. As cartoons are viewed as methods of communication, pragmatics is also concerned with determining the elements of communicative content, which are essential to interpretation. This study tries to cover 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. 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