Conceptual metaphors in media discourses on AIDS denialism in South Africa

[摘要] According to Nattrass (2007:138), the denial and questioning of the science of HIV/AIDSat government level by, amongst others, Thabo Mbeki (former State President) and MantoTshabalala-Msimang (former Minister of Health) resulted in an estimated 343 000preventable AIDS deaths in South Africa by 2007. Such governmental discourse of AIDSdenialism has been the target of criticism in the media and by activist groups such as theTreatment Action Campaign. This study investigates the nature of this criticism,specifically considering the critical use of metaphor in visual texts such as the politicalcartoons of Jonathan Shapiro, who works under the pen name of 'Zapiro. The purpose isto determine whether the nature of the criticism in visual newspaper texts differs from thatof corresponding verbal newspaper texts, possibly providing means of criticism notavailable to the verbal mode alone.A corpus of texts published between August 1999 and December 2007 that topicaliseHIV/AIDS was investigated. This includes 119 cartoons by Zapiro, and 91 verbal articles inthe weekly newspaper Mail & Guardian. The main theoretical approach used in the analysesis Conceptual Metaphor Theory, developed by Lakoff and Johnson (1981), and its extensionto poetic metaphor, developed by Lakoff and Turner (1989). Because of the socio-politicalnature of the problem of HIV/AIDS, the study also draws on Critical Discourse Analysis,including complementary concepts from Systemic Functional Linguistics.The study reveals that visual and verbal texts make use of similar sets of conventionalconceptual metaphors at similar frequencies, which confirms the predictions of ConceptualMetaphor Theory. The study further reveals that the cartoons enrich these metaphorsthrough four specific mechanisms of poetic metaphor, which the verbal articles do not. Thisindicates a significant difference between the two types of texts. Furthermore, it is foundthat the use of such poetic metaphors directly contributes to the critical power of thepolitical cartoons. The study indicates that multi-modality in cartoons, which triggers singlemetaphoric mappings, adds a dimension to the critical function of the text that is absent inthe verbal equivalent. The finding that the visual texts enable a form of cognition that is notavailable to verbal texts, poses one of the most significant avenues for future research.Thus, cartoons apparently achieve a type of criticism that is not found, and may not bepossible, in the verbal texts alone. This makes the political cartoon a text type with animportant and unique ability to articulate political criticism.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University