Social and political cartoons from the Iraqi academics' perspective : a sociopragmatic study

Abstract EN

This study investigates the Iraqi academics' perspective towards social and political cartoons.

It is based on 92 participants who work in different workplaces and live in different Iraqi regions, during the period of the data collection, to guarantee as much authentic and varied information as possible.

The researcher designed a double-layered questionnaire consisting of 8 close-ended questions (layer 1) and 4 open-ended questions (layer 2) to quantitatively and qualitatively examine the level of effectiveness of these c on the participants' social and political attitudes.

In addition, the researcher adopted Radden and Dirven's (2007) taxonomy of modality to inspect the most frequent modal auxiliaries the respondents utilized in their answers to the open-ended questions so as to contextually interpret the meaning of these modals verbs.

The collected data were intended to answer the research questions.

The results of the study showed that social and political cartoons were limitedly able to affect the participants' social attitudes due to their social values and legacy.

However, these cartoons were notably found successful to affect their political attitudes.

The results also indicated that although social and political cartoons were a successful device to depict and convey reality, they were unable to address the Iraqi people's challenges with practical solutions.

These latter findings explained why the participants very frequently utilized modals of potentiality, assessment, and willingness rather than those of assertion in their replies to the open-ended questions