From drawing to doing: speech acts in Qatar world cup cartoons

Abstract

This study examines how illocutionary acts, including welcoming, congratulating, protesting, and stating, are conveyed nonverbally through cartoons about the Qatar World Cup. Drawing on Searle’s (1962) speech act framework and van Dijk, T. 2014. Discourse and knowledge: A sociocognitive approach . Cambridge University Press notion of context models, the study analyzes 30 editorial cartoons using qualitative and quantitative methods. It argues that illocutionary force in multimodal discourse is recognized through viewers’ context models, that is, their subjective and cognitively constructed representations of communicative situations. The findings reveal that cartoons effectively perform speech acts, particularly expressive and directive types. While expressive acts were common across the dataset, directives and assertives were more prevalent among Western cartoonists. The research highlights the communicative power of multimodal and nonverbal discourse, demonstrating how visual and textual elements interact with context models to produce ideological meaning. It contributes to multimodal pragmatics by showing how non-verbal speech acts function in intercultural and politically charged visual communication.