Ukraine and the West in pro-Russia Chinese media: A methodology for the analysis of multimodal political narratives

Abstract

This study represents a research project done at the crossroads of political, multimodal and cognitive linguistics. In focus is the Russia-Ukraine war featured in March – May, 2022 by the English edition of the Global Times, a Chinese media outlet, one of the voices of pro-Russia Chinese state propaganda. The analyzed articles contain political cartoons and thus can be defined as multimodal texts. Together, they mold a narrative, or ‘story’ addressed to international readers and intended to shape their worldview beneficial for Russia. Out study of this narrative aims to reconstruct the mental image it portrays and to expose the ways in which the verbal and visual modes interact to implant this image into the readers’ minds. To fulfil this task, we propose a cognitive linguistic methodology which, applied algorithmically, enables building cognitive ontologies that structure information rendered verbally and visually. The constituents of each ontology have factual and emotive salience, dependent of the number of descriptions provided by empirical texts. We demonstrate how an overlap of the ontologies boosts salience of the key emotively connoted message targeted at the audience. In the study, the interplay between verbal and visual modes in individual texts is characterized in terms of accentuation, elaboration, extension, questioning, and combining considered as universal ways of ‘stretching’ information, which are trackable far beyond the metaphoric domain where they were previously identified by Lakoff and Turner (1989).