Pictorial Framing in Moral Politics

Book excerpt: This book seeks to extend research on framing beyond linguistic and cognitive perspectives by examining framing in visual and multimodal texts and their impact on moral cognition and attitudes. Drawing on perspectives from frame semantics, blending theory, relevance theory, and pragmatics, the volume establishes a model of "pictorial framing", arguing that subtle alterations in the visual presentation of issues around judgment and choice in such texts impact perception, and applies this framework to a range of case studies from Egyptian, British, and American cartoons and illustrations. The book demonstrates the affordances of applying this framework in enhancing our understanding of both the nature of word-image relations and issues of representation in the op-ed genre, but also in other forms of media more generally. The volume will be of particular interest to students and scholars in multimodality, critical discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics, social psychology, and communication studies.