Metaphors in editorial cartoons representing the global financial crisis

Lakoff and Johnson (1980) claim that metaphors play a crucial role in systematically structuring concepts, not just language. Probing the validity of this far-reaching claim requires investigating multimodal discourse. In this paper we analyse the 25 metaphors that structure a sample of 30 political cartoons pertaining to the global financial crisis hitting the world in 2008, finding that certain source domains systematically recur. We examine the role of the visual and verbal modalities and argue that the metaphors are manifestations of underlying conceptual ones. In the service of future research pertaining to multimodal metaphor and multimodal discourse, we moreover explicitly reflect on the methodological problems we encountered, and on the decisions we took to solve them.