Ahmed Abdel-Raheem

This paper presents a theory of audience-resistance and speaker-denial. The paper commences with the problem of definition, encompassing an analysis of the scope and nature of denial and resistance. The data for this study were primarily obtained from mainstream and social media postings in two languages: English and Arabic. The article primarily d...

There is an extensive body of work on taboo language, including metaphor and metonymy, but particular attention needs to be paid to (i) serious genres (and especially op-eds) and (ii) non-English speaking (or non-western) cultures. The present study uses the Sketch Engine search tool on a corpus of 1844 op-ed articles (967,715 words) by columnist D...

Although essential to science and health communication, metaphors can backfire. At this point, any attempt on the part of the speaker to clarify his/her intentions would ultimately prove futile because the mental situation models of speakers and their recipients may not be the same. A debate over the meaning of a metaphor, the variations in its int...

Here are 50 free online copies of the article: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/EXBISYKIEBJJS6VB4T46/full?target=10.1080/15551393.2024.2336927

Decoding images

Using a small corpus of marriage proposal stories authored by British citizens, this paper aims to identify and make explicit seven defining parameters of frames (namely, default elements, default scenario, default context, default inference, default form, default argument, and instantiations) and explain and exemplify each.

Using a corpus of mainly Arabic political cartoons, this article investigates the relationship between multimodal impoliteness and metaphorical creativity. It offers an interesting and admittedly tentative argument that many aspects of creativity in language and verbo-visual arts may be related to what I call "frame flouting or exploitation"-a noti...

The tradition in (im)politeness research so far has been to focus on oral corpora and sometimes on written texts, paying scant attention to multimodal texts such as political cartoons. Can political cartoons be taken as flagging the potential for impoliteness? Can (im)politeness notions be usefully extended to the genre of political cartooning, a g...

The debate about whether the sexes communicate and behave differently continues. The stereotype that women are not funny or that their language or behavior is more “ladylike” is very widespread and has been current for decades, if not centuries. Gender differences in politeness and humor were also frequently reported by early anthropologists, socio...

This article addresses the question of whether context plays a role in creating novel multimodal metaphors. Or, to put the question differently, from where do Arab political cartoonists (as members of several, overlapping or hierarchically related knowledge communities) recruit creative conceptual materials for metaphorical purposes? Specifically,...

Using a large-scale corpus of 706 coronavirus cartoons by male and female Arab artists, this study takes a fresh and more cognitive look at sexism in multimodal discourse. Specifically, it examines the role of salience and grammar (and hence of metaphor and metonymy) in gender bias and/or in discrimination against women. It argues that both men and...

Euphemisms for menstruation and menstruation as a metaphor target have gained much attention in social cognition or communication studies. What is far less explored is the reverse mapping, that is, the use of menstruation as a metaphor source domain (to describe or reason about politics). The present study, using data from the Egyptian press and so...

This paper is meant to give an account of multimodal (im)politeness in political cartoons, drawing primarily on critical discourse studies (CDS) (in particular, Teun van Dijk’s notion of “context models” and Paul Chilton’s concept of “critical discourse moments”), blending theory (Fauconnier and Turner 2002), and speech act theory (especially Geoff...

The use of language and images in the media may have a strong effect on people’s political cognition. In this regard, conspiracy theories and misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine can lead to reluctant uptake of the vaccine even among medical staff. In two experiments, this article tests the hypothesis that the public’s willingness to get vacci...

Pandemics such as Covid-19 are often described in terms of “wars” or “waves” and “troughs.” But this imagery has its potential shortcomings, and therefore a great many researchers and commentators argue that we are thinking about the coronavirus pandemic the wrong way, suggesting replacing the war or ocean analogy with a better or particularly appr...

Since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, there have been thousands of articles on the use of metaphor to describe the crisis. A Google search yields more than 7000 hits. Indeed, an avalanche of metaphors has already been used to describe the Covid-19 pandemic. From war and oceanic metaphors to the dreaded phrase ‘ramping up’, the language and i...

In this paper, we analyze a large-scale corpus of Arab cartoons to measure the correspondence between grammatical gender in Arabic and personified gender in images. The results show that the effect is very strong for males (a near-perfect relationship between the two, grammatical and visual depiction), but the reverse is the case for females (the g...

This article investigates the origin of editorial images, with a focus on the mental processes that enable cartoonists and illustrators across cultures to come up with novel ideas. It provides the most compelling evidence to date that recycling, where artists regularly recycle pictorial and compositional ideas they have developed earlier, is the or...

Illocutionary force indicating devices are something of a neglected topic in visual/multimodal intercultural pragmatics, although a number of scholars have observed that some non-verbal speech-act markers have the characteristic that by employing them in a certain way one can actually accomplish the speech act itself. These not only provide a “cata...

The literature on political cartoons and narrative has revolved around the question of how single-panel images can have narrative potential. This rests on the apparently erroneous assumption that most editorial cartoons, in contrast to comic strips or comic books, lack a continuing story arc that plays out over an n-issue series. Thus, drawing prim...

Depending on context: to depict soaring prices as fires is to perform the act of complaining ; to portray the perpetrator of a sex crime as a wolf is to accomplish the action of condemning ; to draw the ship of state sailing toward catastrophe is simultaneously to perform the action of warning and to issue a prediction; etc. It follows that, if pol...

Mental model theory is taken by scholars like Teun van Dijk as the fundamental idea of epistemic representations about the situations, events, and actions of the natural and social world. Modified by dynamic as well as situationally variable cognitive context (communication) models, the structures of such models, and therefore of the world knowledg...

This article investigates a ubiquitous phenomenon known as multimodal recycling, so called because cartoonists frequently recycle pictorial and compositional ideas they have developed earlier. This phenomenon, it is claimed, presupposes fundamental cognitive processes, like schematization, binding, and categorization. This means that cartoons can b...

The phenomenon this article is studying is so common and important in the everyday world that its name should be known: it is visual/multimodal recycling. It occurs when editorial artists (cartoonists and illustrators) recycle or reuse non-verbal and compositional ideas they have developed earlier. Drawing primarily on neurocognitive theories—such...

There are lots of Western myths about Arab societies, such as the one in which it is common for Arabs to conceptualize the colonization and subsequent control of Arab countries by the West as emasculation. Such myths, unfortunately, come from reliable sources, and do not serve Arabs well. Mythology matters. From a cognitive science perspective, myt...

The body-swap comedy, where someone finds themselves inhabiting an entirely different body, is a well-established Hollywood tradition. Crucially, American filmmakers have tried every twist and contortion of this genre premise at a point or another over the past few decades. And yet, other countries, such as Egypt, Japan, and South Africa, seem to h...

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 imagetext relations in the op-ed genre. Specifically, the paper addresses the following questions: Is there a difference between a...

The primary objective of this paper is to discuss humorous political cartoons contingent on pictorial and textual components, with the heuristic apparatus provided by Fauconnier and Turner’s (2002, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books) conceptual blending theory . Blending is discussed in r...

According to Moral Politics Theory (Lakoff, 1996, 2004, 2006, 2008), a portion of the U.S. population is biconceptual. These citizens subscribe to both the strict-father and nurturant-parent model in their reasoning about ideal families and therefore possess more flexible political attitudes that can shift depending on what family model is brought...

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 v...

After the 2013 coup d’état in Egypt, the Egyptian media launched strenuous campaigns against the Muslim Brotherhood and the West. In this paper, I present a cognitive analysis of a multimodal text of a cartoon with labels, with the goal of gauging its social/political impact. Crucially, the cartoon ‘frames’ its message so strongly that even if the...

Although researchers have paid much attention to the journey metaphor (e.g., Forceville, 2006a, 2011a, 2011b; Forceville & Jeulink, 2011), little seems known about its role for moral political cognition. Using data from the US and UK public discourses on the Euro crisis as an example, this paper draws on Lakoff?s (1996) Moral Politics Theory, demon...

This study examines the role metaphorical thought has played in the reconstruction of confidence in financial media in the Arab and Western worlds after the 2008 global financial crisis. Two strands of linguistic research are used: Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Cognitive Linguistics (CL). I show that both Arab and Western discourses on the...