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DAS0010.1177/0957926517702978Discourse & SocietyAbdel-Raheem

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Discourse & Society

Decoding images: Toward a 1­–26

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DOI: 10.1177/0957926517702978
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Ahmed Abdel-Raheem
The Association of Critical Education, Wroclaw, Poland

Abstract
Using data from the Egyptian public discourse on the United States, this article lays out the
foundation for building a general theory of pictorial framing. In this theory, at the most general
level, the concept of pictorial framing refers to subtle alterations in the visual presentation of
judgment and choice problems. Specifically, pictures are viewed as constructions, and pictorial
meaning is seen as an intricate web of connected frames. The article thus adopts the view that
a visual grammar is part of cognitive science and is fundamentally concerned with the relation
between what goes on in the human mind and manifestations of this activity. The article draws
on insights from blending model (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002), Relevance Theory (Sperber
and Wilson, 1995) and frame semantics (Fillmore, 1985), discussing a large corpus of 90
multimodal cartoons on the United States.

Keywords
America, blending, cartoons, Egyptian media, moral cognition, pictorial framing, relevance
theory

Introduction
The question that keeps being asked by many Americans is ‘Why do many Egyptians/
Arabs hate us so much?’. The starting point to answer this question is to investigate how
Egypt’s media frame the United States.
In this article, the author systematically analyzes a number of editorial cartoons pub-
lished between 2013 and 2016 that portray the United States, with the dual purpose of
identifying how the United States is (mis)represented in the Egyptian media and laying

Corresponding author:
Ahmed Abdel-Raheem, Rogowska 26, 91-529 Lodz, Poland.
Email: [Link]@[Link]
2 Discourse & Society 00(0) 

out the foundation for building a general theory of visual framing. Given their popularity
and omnipresence in the media, one would naturally assume that political cartoons must
shape and strengthen the worldview of members of the public. Crucially, it is argued that
the manner in which an issue is ‘pictorially framed’ may profoundly influence viewers’
perceptions (see also Abdel-Raheem, in press).
I believe my approach and findings are pertinent to various disciplines. In line with
Forceville (1999), I argue that the cognitivist program in the Lakoffian tradition
(Fauconnier and Turner, 2002; Lakoff, 1987; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) provides good
theoretical starting points for investigations of non-verbal manifestations of the mind’s
workings. Moreover, while the discussions of cartoons are largely intended to substanti-
ate the validity of the concept of pictorial framing in itself, the analyses are of independ-
ent interest to students of journalism, and of word and image relations more generally.
The structure of my argument is as follows. In the following section I present my
proposed model of visual framing. In the next two sections, I explain my corpus and
method of analysis. An analysis of the cartoons is then provided and patterns are identi-
fied. The final section lists some general conclusions and outlines suggestions for further
research.

Frame semantics
In cognitive linguistics, frame semantics describes a far-reaching research program in
which all words are defined with respect to how they profile aspects of an associated
frame, or a limited set of background assumptions (Coulson, 2001, 2008). For example,
verbs such as ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ both activate what might be dubbed the Commercial Event
frame (Fillmore, 1968). But the verb ‘buy’ focuses on the Buyer and the Goods, while the
verb ‘sell’ focuses on the Seller and the Money. Langacker claims that while ‘roe’ and
‘caviar’ both are fish eggs, there is a semantic contrast between them because ‘roe’ is
profiled against the frame of the reproductive cycle of fish, while ‘caviar’ is profiled
against the frame of the preparation and (conspicuous) consumption of foods (Langacker,
1987). Conversely, Lakoff (1987) has argued that the concept ‘mother’ cannot be given
an invariant meaning, as it involves a number of different frames or idealized cognitive
models of parenthood (e.g. the birth model, the genetic model, the nurturance model).
In this view, frames can be defined as cognitive structures that are necessary for
understanding and reasoning (Fillmore, 1985; Goffman, 1974). They consist of partici-
pants or frame elements (FEs), often called ‘semantic roles’, and may contain sequences
of actions, called ‘scenarios’ (Lakoff, 2008). In the Commercial Event frame, for exam-
ple, the semantic roles include the Buyer, the Seller, the Goods and the Money. The
Buyer and the Seller are People. The scenario consists of the following states:

The initial state:

The Buyer has the Money and wants the Goods.
The Seller has the Goods and wants the Money.
The middle state (an exchange):
The Buyer gives the Money to the Seller.
Abdel-Raheem 3

The Seller gives the Goods to the Buyer.

The final state:
The Buyer has the Goods.
The Seller has the Money.
(Feldman, 2006: 145)

The multi-state scenario presupposes other frames: a Desire frame, a Possession frame
and a Transfer frame. The Commercial Event frame is not isolated. It is part of a system
and has relations to other frames (e.g. the Shopping frame, the Marketing frame; Lakoff,
2008). In other words, it builds on, and extends, other frames already established.
Furthermore, many frame-circuits are tied to the brain regions of emotions. Emotion
is an inescapable part of real reason (Lakoff, 2010). Brain-damaged people who cannot
feel emotion cannot make rational decisions because they do not know what to want,
since like and not like are meaningless.
In sum, every word is defined in terms of the frames it neurally evokes. All everyday
thinking and talking involves ‘framing’. And as frames come in hierarchal systems, a
single word typically evokes not only its defining frame, ‘but also much of the system its
defining frame is in’ (Lakoff, 2010: 71–72).
Furthermore, political cognition relies heavily on ‘cognitive’ frames (Iyengar, 1991;
Lau and Schlesinger, 2005). For example, Iyengar (1991) found that people use cogni-
tive frames to reason about issues such as crime, terrorism, poverty and racial inequality,
and that those frames significantly influence people’s instances on each issue. As this
author concludes, cognitive frames ‘are key factors in the formation of public opinion’
(p. 127).
However, cognitive frames ought to be distinguished from linguistic and pictorial
frames. In drawing a line between cognitive and linguistic frames, researchers have in
the past resorted to different labels (Wehling, 2013: 86). For example, Kinder and
Sanders (1990) differentiate frames that are ‘embedded in political discourse’1 from
those that are and ‘internal structure of the mind’. However, it was observed that past
research on frames has neither rigorously distinguished ‘pictorial frames’ from cognitive
and linguistic frames nor explicitly formulated what is labeled here ‘pictorial frames’.
To close this theoretical gap, the unique attributes of pictorial frames are discussed.

Pictorial frames
Lakoff and Johnson (1980) have famously claimed that ‘metaphor [a mapping from one
frame to another] is primarily a matter of thought and action, and only derivatively a
matter of language’ (p. 153). Forceville (1996, 2006), in turn, has said that if this
Lakoffian–Johnsonian claim is correct, then metaphors must occur in other modalities.
Just to quote Forceville’s (2006) illustrative example:

[…] imagine somebody wants to cue, for whatever reason, the metaphor CAT IS ELEPHANT
pictorially in an animation film. She could do this for instance by depicting the cat with a trunk-
like snout and large flapping ears; by showing the cat with a canopy on its back in which a
4 Discourse & Society 00(0) 

typical Indian elephant rider is seated; by juxtaposing cat and elephant in the same salient pose;
or by letting the cat behave (for instance: move) in an elephant-like manner. These variants
would constitute monomodal metaphors of the pictorial kind […]. Now imagine the producer
wishes to cue the same metaphor multimodally. She could for instance have the cat make a
trumpeting sound or have another cat shout ‘elephant!’ to the first one […]. In these cases the
source [frame] ELEPHANT would be triggered in two modes (sound and language, respectively
that are different from the target (visuals). (pp. 384–385)

This example of Forceville indeed comes close to what is labeled here ‘pictorial’
frames. Importantly, it shows that other modalities than language can manifest cognitive
frames. That is, conceptual frames can manifest themselves on the linguistic and picto-
rial level – and possibly even in other ways.
A more recent development rooted in the Lakoffian–Johnsonian model is ‘frame-
blending’ theory (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002). This theory, according to Coulson
(2008), is particularly well-suited for the analysis of political cartoons which directly
represent the contents of a ‘frame blend’ and invite the viewer to unpack it into its ‘input
frames’ (p. 38). The problem, however, is that while in discourse the governing and
optimality principles of blending (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002: Chapter 16) constantly
interplay with pragmatic factors, such as relevance (Sperber and Wilson, 1995); blending
scholars have ignored that dimension for the most part. For example, they do not explain
(1) why, given the blend, reconstructing (unpacking) the entire network should be easy,
(2) what makes the unpacking of a blend easy, (3) what governs the selective projection
process (i.e. what comes into the blend from the inputs), (4) how satisfactorily the good
reason constraint (that an element in the blend should be meaningful), in turn, optimizes
integration, and (5) what even counts as a ‘good reason’ in the first place. That is,
Blending Theory (BT) ignores the roles of communicator and addressee in the negotia-
tion of messages – and hence of blends (Forceville, 2004). It is thus crucial to thoroughly
investigate how the audience constructs (or reconstructs) meaning, or how people make
sense of a blend. In developing this claim, I propose adopting Sperber and Wilson’s two
principles of relevance (the Cognitive Principle (that human cognition is geared to the
maximization of relevance), and the Communicative Principle (that utterances/visuals
create expectations of optimal relevance)) as alternatives to Fauconnier and Turner’s 10
optimality constraints (e.g. unpacking, good reason).
Indeed, all this is a precursor to the concept of pictorial framing proposed by the
present research. In order to develop a theory of pictorial frames, however, it is neces-
sary to have a close look at the main attributes of linguistic frames.
Linguistic frames, says Wehling (2013), have the following attributes:

● They can express conceptual frames, and thus the study of language can provide valuable
insight into reasoning processes, including the conceptualization of political morality.
● They always activate conceptual frames, and the use of frames in communication can have
a strong effect on addressees’ perceptions of political issues.
● Linguistic frames in public political debate can result in enormous differences in how
citizens perceive issues.
● Linguistic frames, whether put by citizens, politicians, or journalists, activate cognitive
frames in the minds of the public and can have a strong effect on political cognition, and
Abdel-Raheem 5

even the most subtle alterations in wording can result in information processing biases
among people. (p. 86)

All this can be reformulated to develop a theory of pictorial frames. In this theory, at
the most general level, the concept of pictorial framing refers to subtle alterations in the
visual presentation of judgment and choice problems. That is, the manner in which an
issue is ‘pictorially framed’ may profoundly influence viewers’ perceptions. From this
perspective, cognitive framing is reflected and guided by cartoons, as it is by language,
and the study of visuals can provide valuable insight into reasoning processes.

Overtness gradability hypothesis

Just like language constructs, pictures operate along the ‘Highlighting–Hiding’ gradabil-
ity scale, and any highlighting (by virtue of selecting one ‘specific/strongest’ picture from
the catalogue of all possible pictures which could potentially frame a message) entails
that all the framing pictures become hidden – that is, dormant, until for instance the ini-
tial picture loses its framing power in the course of time (the same process as diaphor
changing to epiphor in metaphoric language) and a need arises to activate an alternative
picture to keep the framing power at a continual high. The framing power of pictures can
change with time; thus there are continually newer and newer pictures taking over the
job from the no longer forceful ones. This all is consistent with all the following accounts:
Forceville’s (2006) pictorial metaphor, Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) conceptual meta-
phor theory (CMT), Sperber and Wilson’s (1995) gradability of implicatures (the ‘onion
metaphor’), and so forth.
For instance, in drawing a distinction between pictorial and multimodal metaphors,
Bounegru and Forceville (2011) state the following:

[…] imagine erasing all verbal elements in the cartoon, and

1. if the visuals still allow for identifying a target […] and a source, the metaphor is construed
as a pictorial one;
2. if neither [sic] target or source becomes unidentifiable, it is construed as a multimodal
metaphor (more specifically: of the verbo-pictorial variety). (p. 213)

This implies that some pictures ‘frame’ their messages much more strongly than oth-
ers. A good example of this is the following cartoon by Hani Tolba published in 2015 by
the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram. The caption reads ‘Source of Terrorism’. The car-
toon depicts three men wearing suicide bomb belts and hopping out of what appears to
be a door in a giant top hat with red and white stripes and white stars on a blue band –
note that the pictorial runes (probably ‘speed lines’, in the sense of Forceville, 2011)
designate the trajectory and direction of the movement (Figure 1). The leading man is
wearing a beard without a moustache and dressed in a black turban, holding a micro-
phone2 close to his open mouth in his left hand and carrying a jambiya (a traditional
dagger in some Arab countries, e.g. Yemen) in the right, while the two other men are
wearing black ski masks, as well as daggers and hand grenades in the belts, and carrying
a bazooka and a machine gun, respectively. All three men, dressed in desert boots and
6 Discourse & Society 00(0) 

Figure 1. America–ISIS (Hani Tolba, Al-Ahram, 2015).

black clothing, are moving from left to right, with their eyes focused forward. And fire
can be seen in the background of the picture.
It is important to notice the rich metonymic content of the cartoon: the top hat stands
for Uncle Sam/America; the beard, no moustache, black hood, desert boots, black cloth-
ing, jambiyas, suicide bomb belts and so on stand for an Islamic State militant; and
according to the ‘part-stands-for-whole’/‘member-stands-for-organization’, one would
indeed postulate another metonym. If this makes sense, two metonyms seem pertinent
here; moreover, the fire is perhaps a metonym for a suicide bombing, where the effect
stands for its own cause; similarly, guns and bombs stand for both instruments of war and
effects of the war. The metaphor UNCLE SAM’S HAT IS HOUSE OF TERRORISTS
can be construed – the object has elements both of a hat and a house (the door). Again,
the hat is a metonym for Uncle Sam, who in turn symbolizes the United States, so that
the interpretation of the cartoon is something like ‘America is a safehouse for suicide
terrorists’ (see Forceville, 2013: 252–253 for a discussion of the connotations of the
concept ‘house’). The text anchors (in the sense of Barthes, 1986 [1961]) this interpreta-
tion, but for a great many viewers this text is ‘redundant’.
The cartoon may be more complex, since it also alludes to the magician’s hat from
which something unexpected emerges. The implication is clear: Uncle Sam/America
created the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Importantly, the cartoon
stresses that America and ISIS are in an alliance to wreak havoc in the region. However,
it suppresses the fact that America is currently fighting ISIS (The Guardian, 1 August
2016), and that many American hostages (e.g. aid worker Kayla Mueller) were murdered
by ISIS (The Guardian, 14 August 2015). The connotations mapped from source to target
Abdel-Raheem 7

are ‘evil’ and ‘dangerous’. Furthermore, the connotative meanings of fire include
‘destructive effects’ and ‘fast-growing proportions that are difficult to control’.
In fact, however, ISIS was ‘born’ from the illegitimate US invasion of Iraq in 2003
(Nance, 2016). Clearly, the image draws on such a view. Finally, a sign invokes an FE,
which invokes a whole, often complex frame, which invokes the system the frame is
embedded in (Lakoff, 2008: 235). Put differently, pictures are viewed as constructions,
and pictorial meaning is an intricate web of connected frames. It is thus crucial to discuss
the general mechanisms behind frame adaptation.

Frame types and general mechanisms behind frame adaptation

Prior-held values can affect whether or not individuals adapt frames, how carefully and
thoroughly they consider messages, and how they think (or talk) about policy issues. In
addition, the stronger and more exclusively individuals embrace certain attitudes, the
less likely they are to be swayed by frames that contradict them.
It is crucial, however, to distinguish the many ways in which frames can relate to
‘values’. Wehling (2013) distinguishes four frame types: (1) frames that do not directly
address values at all, such as the ‘War on Terror’ framing of anti-terrorism efforts (generic
issue frames); (2) frames that draw on values that are not specific to conservative or
liberal morality, such as ‘free speech’ or ‘public order’ (generic value frames); (3) frames
that invoke moral attitudes that follow from conservative or liberal morality, but do not
constitute deeply held moral concerns per se, such as ‘support for public provisions’ or
‘opposition to immigration’ (morality-specific attitude frames); and (4) frames that
directly tap into moral concerns that are specific to either conservative or liberal moral-
ity, such as ‘purity’ and ‘punishment’ or ‘empathy’ and ‘open communication’ (moral
frames) (p. 91; see also Abdel-Raheem, in press).
Individuals are vulnerable to frames only if the value concerns addressed in those
frames link to their moral worldview – this may be best labeled moral relevance (Wehling,
2013: 97). Other factors determining what frames individuals will use to reason about
politics include availability, accessibility and applicability (Chong and Druckman, 2007:
108; see Wehling, 2013 for a detailed discussion).

Pragmatic scales
As pointed out earlier, frame semantics suggests that background knowledge represented
in frames figures prominently in the construction of meaning, as language and pictures
function against this backdrop of cognitive structure. On this model, if, for instance, one
is unfamiliar with temperatures framed in degrees Fahrenheit, knowing that it is 32
degrees outside is not very ‘informative’. Nevertheless, ‘upon being told that the water
freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, that information becomes much more helpful’ (Coulson,
2008: 35). This is in line with Forceville’s (2014) view that any linguistic or pictorial mes-
sage comes with the presumption of relevance – Sperber and Wilson (1995) define rele-
vance as a combined function of effect and effort; they postulate that each communicator
aims at framing his or her message in such a way that the addressee will have to expend
no more effort than necessary to process that message. For example, in Figure 2, someone
8 Discourse & Society 00(0) 

Figure 2. Cartoon of Barack Obama (Forceville, 2014: 61).

‘who does not recognize Obama, and has no idea that he is/was the president of the United
States, and/or is not familiar with the Pinocchio story, will not derive the intended infer-
ences’ (p. 61). Crucially, the decoding of the cartoon, according to this author, involves the
assessment that a man with a shirt, tie and jacket with an exceptionally long nose is por-
trayed. Reference attribution, enrichment and disambiguation lead to the inference that
this is Barack Obama, who at the time of writing is President of the United States of
America. This assessment hinges on resemblance between the portrayed person and
Obama. In addition, the red and blue color scheme activates the original poster in his 2008
presidential election campaign and thus also cues ‘Obama’. The long nose intertextually
refers to Pinocchio. Pinocchio is well-known for the fact that he pathologically lies and
that by way of punishment his nose grows a little longer every time he tells a lie. Forceville
suggests that all this amounts to the explicature (in the sense of Sperber and Wilson, 1995)
‘Obama is a liar’. The textual ‘lies’ anchors this interpretation, but for a great many view-
ers this text is ‘redundant’. The next step is the inference of implicatures (in the sense of
Sperber and Wilson, 1995), such as that the communicator of this cartoon counsels view-
ers to mistrust Obama, or not to vote for him again. In short, ‘the envisaged addressee
needs to be able to recruit a lot of knowledge about the world from his [or her] cognitive
Abdel-Raheem 9

environment’ (Forceville, 2014: 61); this, argues Forceville, allows him or her to derive
pertinent explicatures and implicatures (cf. Forceville and Clark, 2014).
Importantly, ‘the most natural explanation of framing effects is that they reflect the
activation of different frames’ (Coulson, 2008: 34). Persuasive rhetoric thus depends on
a number of cognitive abilities. For example, it depends on preexisting beliefs, values
and practices (Coulson, 2003: 87). Furthermore, political cartoons recruit viewers’ abil-
ity to exploit identity as well as analogy mappings in the interpretation of, for example,
a blended scenario. This promotes novel conceptualizations, involving the generation of
inferences, emotional reactions and rhetorical force.
According to Coulson (2001), contrary to the classical idea of logical argumentation
in which participants derive conclusions from premises stated and assumed, much per-
suasive discourse is characterized by participants’ attempts to activate culturally shared
frames known as cultural models, or ‘idealized cognitive models of sociocultural phe-
nomena’ (Coulson, 2006: 187). Divergent models imply divergent social consequences
for the participants, entail divergent courses of action, and influence the way that events
are ‘interpreted’ and ‘experienced’ (Coulson, 2001; Coulson and Pascual, 2006: 153).
Since multiple models may potentially be applied to the same objective situation, most
moral political arguments concern not the content of these models, but rather which cul-
tural models are the most germane (Coulson and Pascual, 2006: 153–154). Importantly,
different politicians exploit basic meaning construction mechanisms such as framing and
blending to activate the cultural models most consistent with their discursive/ideological
goals (e.g. Lakoff, 1996). Political cartoons, according to Coulson (2003), ‘promote par-
ticular construals of events and personalities, they reinforce the availability of cultural
models, and perhaps even police their use’ (p. 87). Persuasion often takes place ‘when
one integrates an ambiguous scenario with a morally or culturally compelling frame’
(Coulson, 2003).
The aforementioned cartoon, for example, invokes the general moral principle of
‘lying is immoral’. At this level of oversimplification, American people agree on hun-
dreds of things throughout their society. A few examples are that murder is immoral,
theft is immoral and harming innocent people is immoral. The problem, however, is that
as soon as people get down to the nitty-gritty details, they disagree strongly (Lakoff and
Wehling, 2012: 26). For example, what constitutes lying? Harm? Murder? The conserva-
tive and liberal moral systems, for instance, will agree in the oversimplified central cases
but give different answers in more complex situations (see Lakoff and Wehling, 2012 for
a discussion).

Levels of categorization
According to Wehling (2013), source domains can be located at divergent levels of cat-
egorization. They can be above basic-level cognition, at basic-level cognition or below
basic-level cognition. For instance, the concept dog constitutes a basic-level category,
while animal is above and German shepherd below the basic level of cognition.
Political discourse, argues Wehling, regularly implements conceptual metaphors that
rely on basic-level source domains as well as conceptual metaphors that rely on source
domains above the basic level (p. 56). For example, while the common metaphoric
10 Discourse & Society 00(0) 

mapping NATION AS VEHICLE is above the basic level, the metaphoric mappings
NATION AS BOAT, NATION AS TRAIN or NATION AS AIRPLANE all draw from
basic-level source domains. Source domains can thus vary in the level to which they are
semantically specified. Some metaphoric source domains offer very specified frame
semantics, whereas others offer more general, semantically underspecified frame seman-
tics. Wehling thus makes an important point when she distinguishes between semanti-
cally specified low-level and semantically underspecified higher-level source domains.
For instance, the two source domains virus and cancer, as (Wehling, 2016: 196). states,
are both forms of disease, but they come with very different semantic frames that provide
different answers to questions such as the following: How does the disease come about?
What are its consequences for one’s health and life? How is the disease commonly
treated or prevented? Similarly, the following cartoon (Gomah Omran, Al-Ahram, 2014,
Figure 3) shows a giant king cobra, labeled ‘Daesh’ and ‘Made in the United States of
America’, wrapping its body around the Earth and about to dig its fangs into it. This
assessment hinges on resemblance between the depicted snake and cobra, which spreads
out the skin on its neck when it is angry. The text anchors the image. The metaphor we
are invited to construe can be rendered as DAESH IS A US-MADE COBRA. The con-
notations mapped from source to target include danger, poison and fear. Importantly, the
concept cobra is below the basic level of cognition and semantically more specified than
the concept snake, and thus also constitutes a low-level mapping.
Basic-level and low-level mappings, as Wehling (2013) states, have much in common
with each other and commonly overlap. For example, basic-level source domains tend to
be semantically well specified and thus commonly constitute low-level mappings.
Nonetheless, concepts below the basic level of cognition can be semantically even more
specified, and thus also fall into the category of low-level mappings (while not inferring
with the cognitive impact of basic-level categories) (p. 58). Nevertheless, two theoretical

Figure 3. ISIS as US-made snake (Al-Ahram, 2014).

Abdel-Raheem 11

points, argues Wehling, need to be made with regard to the notions of basic-level and
low-level mappings: (1) a basic-level source domain is maximally embedded in the neu-
ral (sensory-motor) system; it brings up clear mental imagery and motor-programs in the
human mind, it is learned early on in life, highly memorable, easily accessible, linguisti-
cally and culturally highly salient, processed via gestalt perception and so on; and (2) the
frame structure of a higher-level source domain is semantically underspecified, whereas
the frame structure of a low-level source domain grants very detailed semantics and a
low degree of semantic contestability (p. 58).
Furthermore, we can have mental images of basic-level categories of chairs – abstract
images that do not fit any particular chair – and general motor actions for sitting in chairs
(Lakoff, 1987: 52); but if one goes from the basic-level category CHAIR to the superor-
dinate category FURNITURE, a difference emerges; that is, we have no abstract mental
images of furniture that are not images of basic-level objects like chairs, tables, beds, and
so on; nor do we have motor actions for interacting with furniture in general that are not
motor actions for interacting with some basic-level object – chairs, tables, beds, and so
on. That is, categories above the basic level are not characterized by images or motor
actions (pp. 51–52). But they do have other human-based attributes – like purposes and
functions (p. 52).
In fact, however, when it comes to visual communication the genre is crucial. For
example, while cartoons commonly implement metaphors that rely on subordinate
source domains as well as metaphors that rely on basic-level source domains, advertising
usually implements metaphors that rely only on subordinate source domains (I argue).
Visual metaphors, then, should be maximally meaningful, as they have a very high
degree of semantic specificity. Note, however, that category cue validity is the sum of all
the individual cue validities of the features associated with a category, and the highest
cue validities in a taxonomic hierarchy should take place at the basic level (Lakoff, 1987:
53). For instance, subordinate categories such as kitchen chair should have a low cat-
egory cue validity because most of the attributes of kitchen chairs would be shared with
other types of chairs and only a few attributes would differentiate kitchen chairs from
other chairs. The individual attributes shared across categories would have low cue
validities for the kitchen chair category; thus, seeing a chair with a back does not give us
much reason for thinking it is a kitchen chair rather than some other type of chair.
Because most of the individual cue validities for attributes would be low, the sum should
be low (Lakoff, 1987). In fact, knowledge is organized at the basic level, that is deter-
mined in the following way:

When subjects are asked to list attributes of categories, […] they list most of what they know
at the basic level (chair, car, dog); and at the subordinate level (rocking chair, sports car,
retriever) there is virtually no increase in knowledge over the basic level. (p. 47)

Thus, as mentioned earlier, for a message to be relevant to a given addressee, that mes-
sage must have an ‘effect’ on the sum total of knowledge, beliefs and emotions (called
the ‘cognitive environment’; Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 38) of that addressee. For
example, somebody who cannot identify the type of snake in Figure 3 will not derive
the intended inferences.
12 Discourse & Society 00(0) 

Political cartoons and cartoon strips

Genre is seen as ‘the primary cue for channeling interpretation and constitutes the single
most important pragmatic element steering viewers’ interpretations of discourse’
(Forceville, 2016: 98). For example, while in advertising the connotations from Source
to Target (=product), as Forceville (1996) claims, are usually positive, the opposite is
usually true for political cartoons (Forceville and Urios-Aparisi, 2009).
Pictures are constructions, and pictorial meaning is an intricate web of connected
frames. This, I presume, overlaps with some notion of productive inter-textuality – cer-
tainly an important mechanism across all modalities, with visual modalities making
addition or good use of the indexing power of our visual perceptual system (as in homage
in film, visual ‘quotation’ etc.).
Connections between images are thus needed to reach an accurate interpretation.
Editorial cartoons ‘may be seen rhetorically as narratives, and express narrative features,
but these features are not assisted by the format of the cartoon (unlike comic strips)’
(Edwards, 1997: xii). Consider, for example, the two cartoons by Al-Ahram’s artist Anas
Eldeeb. The first image (Figure 4a), published in August 2014, shows a bearded gunman
with a long blue gown carrying a large pot of – perhaps – meat, labeled ‘The Middle
East’, and feeding a potbellied man with a white skull cap, a grey shirt (marked with the
Israeli flag), and a brown jacket, seated at a four-legged stool with his hands soaked in
blood. The second image (Figure 4b), published in October 2015, shows a child in chains
holding a sign reading ‘Palestine’ in his left hand and a slingshot in his right, and stand-
ing in front of the same potbellied man depicted in Figure 4a. The man says, ‘Rescue me
from this criminal; he wants to kill me’. Reference attribution, enrichment and disam-
biguation lead to the conclusion that the potbellied man is Israel and the child is Palestine.
Moreover, most viewers would realize that the gunman in Figure 4a stands for militant
groups in the Arab world (e.g. ISIS).

Figure 4. (a) Strip 1 (Anas Eldeeb, (b) Strip 2 (Anas Eldeeb, Al-Ahram,
Al-Ahram, 2014). 2015).
Abdel-Raheem 13

The defining elements of the narrative in the two cartoons include characters or agents
(Israel, terrorists, the Middle East and Palestine), setting/scene/place (Israel seated at a stool
and hands soaked in blood), narrators (the cartoonist), plot (terrorists serve Israel; Israel
pretends it is a victim when it is actually a perpetrator). Plot ‘incorporates sequence, or illu-
sion of sequence, for plot’ (Edwards, 1997: 44); it exists by means of an unfolding of action
that leads through events and expresses order and duration (Edwards, 1997). Note that
Israel’s large potbelly in Figure 4b, for example, stands for its action in Figure 4a (eating).

Data
The data for this study consist of 90 editorial cartoons pertaining to the United States and
published between 30 June 2013 and 30 October 2016 in Egypt’s two prestigious state
newspapers Al-Ahram and Al-Akhbar. This specific time period was selected in order to
cover important events after the 2013 coup d’etat against Egyptian President Mohamed
Morsi, who belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood, such as the US decision to cut aid to Egypt
and Western criticism over democracy in the country. The selected time period, one argues,
is the most prolific for editorial cartoons related to the United States, as well as Europe. The
cartoons were retrieved from the Web archives of the two newspapers selected for the study.

Some analytical tools and governing principles

As laid out earlier, the proposed model for visual/multimodal analysis distinguishes two
stages in the interpretation process: (1) the decoding of visual or multimodal signals and
(2) the deriving of their explicatures and implicatures. Pragmatic inferences of the impli-
cature variety will be fed by hypotheses about the goals of the elements in the image
being depicted in a particular situation, which build on information from previous
images, on our knowledge of the depicted character and so on (see also Forceville, 2014).
Furthermore, the model promotes blending theory as an explanation of the cognitive
work that underlies meaning, within and without communication – blending is a basic
cognitive operation, and therefore it is not limited to discourse.
Finally, images, like words, are neurally linked to the circuits that determine their
meaning. The more an image is viewed, the more the circuit is activated and the stronger
it gets, and so the easier it is to fire again. For instance, it has long been Egyptian media
strategy to repeat over and over images that evoke their frames and define issues their
way. Such repetition makes their images normal, everyday pictures and their frames
normal, everyday ways to think about issues. Frame blending is often involved in politi-
cal rhetoric because it can be used to change the way that individuals conceptualize the
input concepts (Coulson, 2003: 65). Pictorial frames need to be repeated over and over
again, and refined until they take their rightful place in the public’s synapses.

General principles
There are several strategies that deserve attention when analyzing a specific visual/mul-
timodal discourse and related texts. Heuristically, I orient myself to the following ques-
tions: (1) How (and what) are persons, objects, events referred to visually/linguistically?
14 Discourse & Society 00(0) 

(2) What value(s), if any, does the visual/multimodal text in question invoke? (3) What
are the text-internal and text-external elements of context involved (in line with
Forceville (1996), it is argued that an examination of text-internal context does not
suffice; text-external factors such as cultural conventions, expectations and genre-
attributions need to be considered as well)? (4) What argument is employed in the image
or multimodal text in question? (5) What audience is this frame intended to attract? And
(6) is the frame employed in the picture metaphorical or not (here, one assumes that
metaphorical and non-metaphorical blends should imply different cognitive bearings)?
Finally, some of the most important principles of my approach include the following:
(1) it is interdisciplinary – this involves theory, methods, methodology, research practice
and practical application; (2) it is problem/issue oriented; (3) various theories and meth-
ods are combined; (4) various material carriers, modes and genres are studied; (5) the
research moves recursively between theory and empirical data; and (6) the application of
results is a crucial target, that is, results should be made available and applied by experts
and be communicated to the public. (Those general principles are somewhat analogous
to those of the discourse-historical approach by Wodak, 2001.)

Metaphor identification
In order to identify something as a metaphor, I used the following criteria from
Bounegru and Forceville (2011):

(1) An identity relation is created between two phenomena that, in the given context, belong
to different categories;
(2) The phenomena are to be understood as target and source, respectively; they are not, in the
context, reversible;
(3) At least one characteristic/connotation associated with the source domain is to be
mapped onto the target domain; often an aligned structure of connotations is to be so
mapped. (p. 213)

Note that metaphor is a byproduct of blending. Moreover, it is usually distinguished

from metonymy by saying that in metaphor the two terms belong to different categories,
while in metonymy they belong to the same category. For example, in ‘She is a pretty
face/He is a real brain’, ‘brains’/‘pretty face’ is a metonymy for the ‘individual’ to whom
it is applied because both ‘brains’ and ‘individual’ belong to the same category – say
PERSON. Moreover, by and large one would say that ‘mapping features’ is what hap-
pens in metaphor, while something like ‘shifting perspective/zooming in on/focusing on
…’ would be more appropriate descriptions of what happens in metonymy (see Forceville,
2009). For example, ‘pretty face’ in ‘She is a pretty face’ zooms in on a girl’s appearance
(not intelligence, for instance), and ‘real brain’ in ‘He is a real brain’ focuses on the
person’s intelligence (not handsomeness, for instance).

Analysis
The quantitative analysis shows that Egypt’s media resort to at least four frame systems
when reasoning about the United States: US–ISIS, US–Muslim-Brotherhood, US–Israel
Abdel-Raheem 15

and US–Middle-East. These four frame systems are highly complex, with many sub-
components, and they form a unified, cognitive model (Table 1).
For reasons of spaces, I will give only one outstanding example of, say, the first frame
system (Figure 5). Decoding this cartoon (Gomah Omran, Al-Ahram, 2014) involves
assessing that there is a man in US military uniform holding a large-sized German shep-
herd dog labeled ‘Daesh’ on a chain leash while sicking it on a bald man dressed in an
apparently grey suit with a black T-shirt displaying ‘Syria’. The bald man seems to be
screaming in pain, with his mouth open and eyes closed, and helpless, with his palms up
and body bent backwards while the wild dog is attacking him, with its mouth open, left
front leg on the man’s chest, and left back one on his left thigh. The solider appears con-
fident and at ease, as if feeling in control. Viewers knowledgeable about the US army
would realize that the solider belongs to the Special Operations Forces (thanks to the tan
beret); in other words, the Special Operations uniform may not stand out to typical read-
ers. To some viewers/readers, the backwards flag may symbolize being against American
values; in my view, however, it is designed (large and partially facing the viewer) to be
easily recognized. The black shirt of the Syrian and the black cloak of the dog may sym-
bolize their Muslim commonality. ‘Bald’ may imply old age or frailty – the NATION AS
PERSON metaphor is at work here. The cartoon is labeled ‘Obama revises his strategy
towards Daesh, with the aim of toppling al-Assad!’. This refers to the news that in
November 2014, then-US President Barack Obama asked his national security team for
another review of the US policy toward Syria after realizing that ISIS might not be
defeated without a political transition in Syria and the removal of President Bashar al-
Assad (CNN, 13 November 2014). Furthermore, we know the name of the artist because
of the Barthesian anchoring ‘Gomah Omran’ (in Arabic) in the bottom left-hand corner.
Finally, the fact that this picture belongs to the genre of the ‘political cartoon’ is indispen-
sable pragmatic knowledge, since a political cartoon has ‘critical stance’ as one of its
genre-conventions (Forceville, 2016: 79).
Here, interestingly, there is strictly speaking incongruity between the text and the
image, perhaps resulting in ‘humorous’ irony: in one case, an image portrays America
using ISIS to torture Syria, while in the other, the American administration claims that
its target is al-Assad’s regime not Syria. According to Wilson and Sperber (2012),
‘irony consists in echoing a thought (e.g. a belief, an intention, a norm-based expecta-
tion) attributed to an individual, a group, or to people in general, and expressing a
mocking, sceptical or critical attitude to this thought’ (p. 125). On this account, ‘an
ironical utterance typically implies that the speaker believes the opposite of what was
said, but this is neither the meaning nor the point of the utterance’ (Wilson and Sperber,
2012). That is, in our example the cartoonist is expressing an attitude of scorn toward
(say) the general expectation among viewers that America would revise its strategy
toward Daesh, with the aim of toppling al-Assad. Why is incongruity humorous? The
sudden bisociation of an idea or event with two habitually incompatible matrices
produces a comic effect,

provided that the narrative, the semantic pipeline, carries the right kind of emotional tension.
When the pipe is punctured, and our expectations are fooled, the now redundant tension gushes
out in laughter, or is spilled in the gentler form of the sou-rire. (Koestler, 1964: 51)
16 Discourse & Society 00(0) 

Table 1. The most frequent frames in the data.

Frame system Subcomponents Frequency

1. US–ISIS a. OBAMA AS COWBOY; AMERICA AS HORSE; ISIS AS BULL; 25%

THE NEW MIDDLE EAST PROJECT AS RANCH
b. AMERICA AS SPECIAL FORCES OFFICER SICKING GERMAN
SHEPHERD DOG ON SYRIA; ISIS AS GERMAN SHEPHERD
DOG; SYRIA AS BALD MAN
c. ISIS AS US-MADE COBRA
d. ISIS–AMERICA AS MAN BUTCHERING THE MIDDLE EAST’S
MAP
e. ISIS–US RELATIONSHIP AS SECRET MARRIAGE; US AS
WOMAN WITH NAKED BREASTS
f. ISIS AND US ARE TWO MEN FIGHTING OVER A SINGLE-
HOSE DISPENSER
g. OBAMA AS BARBER; ISIS AS (NAPPING) CUSTOMER;
OILFIELDS AS HAIR; AMERICAN OIL COMPANIES AS BLOW
DRYER
2. US–Israel a. US–ISRAELI RELATIONSHIP AS CLOSENESS; US AS 30%
UNCLE SAM REDRAWING SYRIA’S MAP; ISRAEL AS MAN
WANTING A PIECE OF SYRIA’S LAND
b. SYRIAN PRESIDENT BASHAR AL-ASSAD AS COCKY
ROOSTER, CHEMICAL WEAPONS AS COCKTAIL;
US–ISRAELI RELATIONSHIP AS CLOSENESS; AMERICA
AS OBAMA WANTING TO PLUCK OUT AL-ASSAD’S
FEATHERS FOR THE SAKE OF ISRAEL
c. THE RED STRIPES OF AMERICA’S FLAG AS ISIS SWORDS
COVERED IN BLOOD, THE STARS AS STARS OF DAVID,
EGYPTIAN NATION AS VICTIM, EGYPTIAN NATION AS
FAMILY
d. MASSAGE PARLOUR: US AS WOMAN WITH STRAPLESS
BODYCON DRESS GIVING A BACK MASSAGE TO ISRAEL’S
PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU
e. OBAMA AS GLOVE PUPPET, NETANYAHU AS PUPPETEER
f. US AS FATHER OF ISRAEL AND THE MUSLIM
BROTHERHOOD
[Link]–Muslim- a. US AS FATHER OF THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD 30%
Brotherhood b. US AS SATAN, US AS FATHER OF THE MUSLIM
BROTHERHOOD AND ISRAEL
c. OBAMA AS MUSLIM BROTHER, THE AMERICAN FLAG’S
FIELD OF STARS AS THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD’S LOGO
[Link]–Middle- a. US, ISRAEL AND TURKEY ARE GAS JOCKEYS PUMPING 15%
East FUEL INTO ISIS TANK STANDING OVER IRAQIS’ BODIES
b. AN ACT OF TREACHERY IS A STAB IN THE BACK; (US)
POLITICS IS A STAB IN THE HEART: PALESTINE AS MAN,
ISRAEL AS DAGGER, BRITAIN AS HAND STABBING
PALESTINE IN THE BACK WITH THAT DAGGER, US AS
HAND STABBING PALESTINE IN THE HEART
c. US–QATARI RELATIONSHIP IS CLOSENESS, QATAR
AS DWARF SITTING ON UNCLE SAM’S LAP AND
CHALLENGING ARAB GIANT (=ARAB UNANIMITY),
POWERFUL IS BIG
d. (US) POLITICS AS HIT ON THE HEAD OF SAUDI ARABIA/
THE ARAB WORLD, JUSTICE AGAINST SPONSORS OF
TERRORISM ACT (JASTA) AS CLUB, NATION AS PERSON
Abdel-Raheem 17

Figure 5. US–ISIS: German shepherd (Al-Ahram, 2014).

In other words, humor often involves the unlikely combination of related structures (see
Coulson, 2005). Clearly, part of the humor in our example can be attributed to the juxta-
position of the American-attack-on-Syria scenario with a term about Obama’s strategy
toward Daesh and al-Assad. However, not just any combination of these frames results
in a comic effect. Crucially, both the content of the cartoon and the way in which it devel-
ops affect its comic potential. Furthermore, according to Yus (2016), expectations of
humorous effects are part of the mutually manifest information between interlocutors:
the role of interactive frames (p. 87). After all, removing the caption may result in the
disappearance of the ironic meaning. That is, the humorous irony here, I think, is pro-
duced by lexis and image intersection. This is in line with Yus’ (2016) view that humor-
centered incongruities are pleasurable because the addressee maintains them both while
the underlying intentions of the speaker are revealed and after the resolution phase has
been completed (p. 93); this, argues Yus, is also particularly noticeable in advertisements
with a combination of image and text in which the normal relevance-oriented interpreta-
tion of the text clashes with a parallel interpretation favored by the accompanying image.
In this example, a blended network is constructed in the following way: there are
input mental spaces corresponding to the two contrasting scenarios: ‘war in Syria’ and
‘sicking a dog/German shepherd on somebody’. From the ‘war in Syria’ space, we
project America’s military, ISIS and Syria. From the other space, we project ‘Master’,
‘German Shepherd’ and ‘Victim’. In the blend, America’s military is the master, ISIS
is the German shepherd and Syria is the victim. According to the ‘member-stands-for-
organization’ metonymy, the solider stands for America’s military, and according to
the part-stands-for-whole, America’s military stands for the country. Furthermore, the
NATION AS PERSON metaphor is at work: SYRIA AS MAN/VICTIM. The image
18 Discourse & Society 00(0) 

invites explicatures such as ‘these are two men and a German shepherd dog’, or ‘these
are Syria, ISIS, and America’, or even ‘America is “sicking” ISIS on Syria’. So we
would have to say either that this image conveys multiple propositions, or that the only
intended explicature is ‘America is “sicking” ISIS on Syria’, the other propositions
then being implicated premises (see Forceville, 2014 for more examples of implicated
premises).
Note here that both German shepherd and ‘special forces officer’ are subordinate
categories, and thus are more semantically specified than their basic-level categories dog
and solider, respectively. The mappings from German shepherd to Daesh, for instance,
include ‘large’, ‘strong’, ‘trained’ and ‘used by police’.
Strong implicatures may include that the communicator of this picture counsels
Egyptians to mistrust the United States. Note that pragmatic inferences of the implicature
variety will be fed by hypotheses about the officer’s goals in this particular situation,
which build on information from previous editorial images, on our knowledge of the
character of Special Forces soldiers, and so on.
As laid out earlier, the envisaged addressee needs to be able to recruit a lot of knowl-
edge about the world from her cognitive environment. Somebody who does not recog-
nize an element in the image, and/or is not familiar with the narrative in the image, will
not derive the intended inferences. But it may also be the case that the viewer well knows
about all elements in the image but nonetheless fails to recognize them in this image,
and is not familiar with the color scheme and the artistic style of the image. This, as
Forceville (2014) explains, ‘would perhaps be similar to the failure of communication
due to mis-hearing, or not knowing, a crucial word in an interlocutor’s utterance’ (pp.
61–62). It might be objected that one would have to get used to a certain style of drawing,
say a house, a man, a beautiful girl, and so on, before being able to derive pertinent
explicatures from images. To the extent that this is true, one, argues Forceville,

could counter that, in language, a listener unfamiliar with regional language variations has
a less-than-perfect command of the code, and therefore is unable to derive certain
explicatures in such dialectical utterances. Once that person has mastered certain words or
expressions, he has solved this problem. In my view, this is not really different from having,
in some cases, to ‘learn’ the code of a cartoon style (say, Japanese Manga). Here is another
example: an architect’s blueprint is a type of drawing that is supposed to be very precise
indeed – unlike, for instance, the child’s stylized house with a few token windows and a
door. But one has to learn the code to derive the explicatures, and it is explicatures, explicit
content, that count here. (p. 62)

Again, some images, in my view, frame their messages more strongly than others.
Moreover, images generally have to rely strongly on stereotypes to depict (categories of)
individuals, objects and events. Furthermore, images can indeed be seen as construc-
tions, and pictorial meaning can be viewed as an intricate web of connected frames.
Moreover, some frames may, of course, invoke certain values in individuals’ minds
and be partial to certain policies. For example, the above visual framing of the United
States (Figure 5) clearly invokes the conservative value of good–evil dichotomy (that the
world is divided into good and evil; see Wehling, 2013). A moral narrative, argues Lakoff
(2008), has two parts, both of which are physical in people’s brains (p. 93). The first is
the dramatic structure of the narrative, with semantic roles such as Hero (good), Villain
Abdel-Raheem 19

(evil), Victim (helpless, innocent), Helper, Rescuer performing actions and undergoing
effects. The second is the emotional structure, or ‘somatic markers’, linking the dramatic
structure to positive and negative emotional circuitry. According to Lakoff, they provide
the emotional texture of simple narratives – note that narratives are special cases of
frames (Lakoff, 2008: 22–26). Because they are neurally bound, the emotional structure
of the narrative (e.g. anger, fear, relief) is inseparable from the dramatic structure
(Villainous Act (harmful), Battle, Victory). Once we factor out the frame specifics, a lot
of the narratives in our corpus look similar. In other words, our corpus has a general/deep
rescue narrative. The scenario is usually in the following order:

Start: Villain harms Victim;

Central: Hero struggles against Villain;
Finish: Hero defeats Villain;
Final State: Victim is Rescued, Hero Rewarded and Villain Punished.

The Victory, Rescue, Punishment and Reward restore the moral balance. There is also
a variant in which the Hero is the Victim. This is a self-defense narrative: the Hero res-
cues himself (see Lakoff, 2008 for analogous analyses). It might be useful to get at this
with another concrete pictorial frame: THE EGYPTIAN PEOPLE (HERO) AS HAND
STABBING BOTH OBAMA (VILLAIN) AND A MUSLIM BROTHER/ISLAMIC
STATE MILITANT (VILLAIN) IN THE STOMACH WITH A HUGE KITCHEN
KNIFE; in this image (Mostafa Houssien,3 Al-Akhbar, 2013; Figure 6), Obama screams,
‘Ayy [an exclamation expressive of pain], I’ll hit Syria [Victim]’. Obama, via both meta-
phor and metonymy, can stand conceptually for America (Villain). Similarly, an Islamic
militant is a metonym for his organization. Furthermore, central body parts in some
cultures are more essential to survive than peripheral ones (e.g. being stabbed in the back
is less likely to cause death than being stabbed in the stomach or heart).
Indeed, simple frames/narratives ‘can be combined to form more complex ones’, and
‘[p]art of what makes them cultural is that they use cultural prototypes, themes, images,
and icons’ (Lakoff, 2008: 23). Furthermore, the same as language, images connect to our
conceptual structure of frames and metaphors in complex ways. In Egyptian culture, the
metaphor KILLING SOMEONE/ENDING THEIR CAREER IS CUTTING THEIR
HAIR OR BEARD usually occurs. In the following cartoon by Tamer Youssef (Al-Ahram,
16 October 2014; Figure 7), for example, Obama and an ISIS militant are depicted as a
barber and a customer, respectively – the black headband with the white Arabic writing
“There is no god but Allah” tied around the militant’s forehead clearly invokes the flag
of ISIS. Addressing the napping militant from behind, Obama says ‘Hair or beard?’
with a big grin and thumb-and-forefinger-in-a-circle gesture, denoting that all is well or
perfect. In the background, there are two barrels and a giant blow dryer directed at a
machine (drilling rig) labeled ‘Oil fields’. The caption reads, ‘Drying up Daesh’s finan-
cial resources’.
The barber shop frame is complex and includes both a Commercial Event frame and
a Serving-of-Trimming frame, where the Goods in the Commercial Event frame is the
Trimming in the Serving-of-Trimming frame. The semantic roles are Barber and
Customer, Service (Trimming) and Money. There is a sequence:
20 Discourse & Society 00(0) 

Figure 6. Hero stabbing Villain cartoon (Al-Akhbar, 2013).

Start: The Customer arrives at/enters the barber shop and sits in a chair, waiting for
his turn;
Central: The Customer sits in the barber chair, and the Barber asks him, ‘Hair or
beard?’
Finish: The Barber trims the Customer’s hair or beard, and the Customer gives the
Money to the Barber.
Final: The Customer has his hair or beard trimmed, and the Barber has the Money; the
Customer leaves the barber shop.

The phrase ‘Hair or beard?’ was made famous by late Egyptian actor Adel Adham in
the fight scene between him and another late Egyptian actor, Nour el-Sherif, in the 1981
Arabic movie Al-Shitan Ya’ez (The Devil preaches), directed by Ashraf Fahmy. In this
scene, el-Shebli (played by Adham) pulls a cut-throat razor out of his pocket before
directing his question to Shata el-Hagari (played by el-Sherif) and injuring him in the
belly. Here, the Killing frame has the following semantic roles: Killer (i.e. the person or
sentient entity that causes the death of the Victim), Victim (i.e. the living entity that dies
as a result of the killing), Instrument (i.e. the device used by the Killer to bring about
Abdel-Raheem 21

Figure 7. The Barber frame (Al-Ahram, 16 October 2014).

death to the Victim) and Means (i.e. the method or action that the Killer performs result-
ing in the death of the Victim). The Killing frame has also some other (non-core) ele-
ments such as Beneficiary (this extra-thematic FE applies to participants that derive a
benefit from the occurrence of the event specified by the target predicate); Circumstances
(i.e. the state of the world (at a particular time and place) which is specifically independ-
ent of the event itself and any of its participants); Containing event (this FE denotes an
event that takes place or state of affairs that holds at a time that includes the time during
which the event or state of affairs reported by the target occurs and of which it is taken
to be a part); Degree (this appears with pictorial elements to describe the killing potential
of an object or how widespread the killing is); Depictive (i.e. the state of the Killer or
Victim during the killing); Explanation (i.e. the preexisting state of affairs that the Killer
is responding to); Manner (i.e. any description of the event which is not covered by more
specific FEs, including force (hard, softly), secondary effects (quietly, loudly) and gen-
eral descriptions comparing events (the same way); it may visually indicate salient char-
acteristics of a Killer that also affect the action (presumptuously, coldly, deliberately,
eagerly, carefully)); Place (i.e. the location where the death took place), Purpose (i.e. the
state of affairs that the Killer is trying to bring about by killing); Result (i.e. the state of
the Victim that results from being killed); and Time (i.e. the point or period of time
within which the Victim is killed).4
The ‘Hair or beard?’ image/phrase is defined relative to a complex frame made up of
two parts – the Barber shop and the Killing – and a neural binding linking them into a
single whole.
22 Discourse & Society 00(0) 

The bindings for ‘Hair or beard?’

Killer/Barber = America; the Dying entity/Customer = ISIS; Means = Drying up ISIS’
financial resources; Instrument/Blow dryer = American oil companies; Manner = Coldly
and deliberately; Purpose = Seizing Iraq’s oil; Depictive = Cool (America)/Napping
(ISIS) and so on.
Start a = Start b: Entering the barber shop = Starting the fight; Central a = Central b:
Sitting in the barber chair = The Victim being stabbed by the Killer; Final a = Final b:
Leaving the barber shop = Being killed.
Here, the meaning is parsed according to its function in several different narratives.
Somebody who is not familiar with the movie will not derive the intended inferences.

Conclusion
This article had a twofold objective: (1) to identify how the United States of America is
(mis)represented in the Egyptian media, and (2) to present the first version of a model to
research pictorial frames. In this manner, the model can be further tested, refined and
elaborated in future research.
The analysis demonstrated that after the 2013 coup against Egyptian President Mohamed
Morsi, who belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood, the two state-owned newspapers Al-Ahram
and Al-Akhbar adopted the view ‘you are either with us or against us’, that is, if you con-
demn the coup, you are an enemy of the country and collaborating to balkanize it or the
Middle East as a whole. Specifically, Egypt’s violence was ‘fuelling a furious backlash
against the US, Britain and other western countries for supposedly supporting the Muslim
Brotherhood in its bloody confrontation with the military-backed government that over-
threw Mohamed Morsi’ (The Guardian, 18 August 2013);5 Turkey and Qatar – both sup-
porters of the Brotherhood – were also targets for abuse, as was Israel (Arabs’ ‘number one’
enemy and America’s ‘son’). The two state-controlled newspapers’ message was that Egypt
was facing a foreign ‘conspiracy’ to undermine its stability. Specifically, as the United
States had held up the delivery of certain military and economic aid to Egypt in protest
against Morsi’s overthrow (The Guardian, 9 October 2013), Al-Ahram and Al-Akhbar
resorted to at least four frame systems when reasoning about the United States: US–ISIS,
US–Muslim-Brotherhood, US–Israel and US–Middle-East. These four frame systems are
highly complex, with many subcomponents, and they form a unified, cognitive model.
The Egyptian media discourse on the United States invoked conservative values, such
as a good–evil dichotomy (with the United States as Villain (‘sponsor of terrorism’),
Egypt/Arab countries as Victim and Egypt/the Arab world as Hero), direct causation
(that events in the world (e.g. Egypt’s economic problems) have a direct cause (the
United States) and punishment (that Villain must be punished)). When Egyptians accept
this deep conservative moral narrative, they ignore or hide realities that contradict it: the
coup has stifled freedoms in the country and damaged the economy, including the tour-
ism industry (New York Times, 4 October 2014: SR10). Value-based metaphoric framing
may thus bring values to the fore of people’s reasoning and discourse.
In sum, conservative morality indeed seems to play an important role in Egypt.
Perhaps liberal morality also plays a role in the country, but not one liberal frame was
Abdel-Raheem 23

found in the data. This can help us better understand which particular ‘worldview’ the
two media in our study are infused with – with particular regard to the United States.
This also shows that political cartoons often have a serious rhetorical agenda.
Hopefully, this investigation contributes to our understanding of visual communica-
tion in general, and shows the value that results from merging cognitive linguistics, mul-
timodality and pragmatics. Comic scholars, cognitivists, theorists of visual metaphor and
metonymy, and critical analysts of multimodal discourse should find my model and find-
ings pertinent to their concern. Moreover, people in the field of American studies may
benefit from the systematic examination of pictorial frames.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Notes
1. Unfortunately, a great many researchers in the cognitive and social sciences employ ‘dis-
course’ rather informally (see Widdowson, 1995: 158). Critical Discourse Analysis, however,
defines discourse both as language use in speech and writing (or ‘text in context’) and as
a form of social practice (Fairclough and Wodak, 1997: 258); other definitions include a
‘set of texts’ (Dressler and Merlini-Barbaresi, 1994: 6) – some, however, may want to avoid
using ‘text’ because of its verbal connotations, as ‘visual text’ or ‘multimodal text’ seems
somewhat awkward. In this study, ‘discourse’ is understood as an act of communication-in-
context. This means for us that its genre is usually clear, and steers and narrows down possible
interpretations.
2. Note that pictures of hate preachers and ISIS fighters are often armed with microphones.
3. We know that the cartoon is made by Houssien because of the photograph of his face in the
top left-hand corner, his signature under it, and his email address in the bottom left-hand cor-
ner. Here, we point to the picture of the artist’s face and say ‘That’s Mostafa Houssien’, not
‘That’s the face of Mostafa Houssien’. We have constructed a network mapping Houssien to
the picture of what seems to us his most salient part, his face. In the blended space, the face is
projected from one input mental space and the whole person is projected from the other. In the
blend, face and person are fused: the face is the personal identity. The part-whole connection
between the face and person in the inputs becomes uniqueness in the blend. The same could
be done with other body parts, as when we see a picture for (say) Uncle Sam and say, seeing
only the legs, ‘That’s Uncle Sam’.
4. Visit [Link]
5. Moreover, the United States has ‘accidentally’ airdropped a pallet of weapons to ISIS
(MacAskill and Chulov, 2014).

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Author biography
Ahmed Abdel-Raheem is a guest lecturer at the Association of Critical Education in Wroclaw,
Poland. He holds a PhD in linguistics from the University of Lodz, Poland, and is a former lecturer
at Umm al-Qura University in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. He is also founding editor and co-editor of the
John Benjamins journal Moral Cognition and Communication. He has published internationally in
a number of journals, such as Metaphor and the Social World, Visual Communication Quarterly,
Pragmatics and Cognition and Sciences de la Société. Moreover, he is a regular contributor to
international news outlets, including The Guardian, Forbes, The Newnan Times-Herald, The
Jerusalem Post, The Commentator and Inside Sources, among others.