Social Praxis Of Multimodal Environmental Discourse: A Dialectical Ecolinguistic Analysis Of Print Media Cartoons

Abstract

The current study explores dimensions of the dialectical relationship between three domains of social praxis: ideological, sociological, and biological (Steffensen & Fill, 2014). The primary interest was to explore a mutually constitutive relationship among the three dimensions as conceptualized in the model of dialectical Ecolinguistics and hypothesized to be represented in the selected textual data. Cartoon strips from the most widely read Pakistani newspapers have been selected as data and treated as multimodal discourse. Visual narrativization, visual grammar, and the dialectical relationship between language and the three dimensions of life have been used for conceptual grounding.  A guided close reading of the visuals has been conducted to trace strategic framing of and foregrounding in the stories as reflected in the visual grammatical constructions in the selected visuals/cartoon strips. The purpose was to find a conflation between the three dimensions of discourse production. Such collaborative functioning among ideological, social, and biological was substantiated by how all three factors influenced the meaning-making process. It was found that various processual aspects of meaning-making are contributed by the three factors in point, and any shift in any of them affects a shift in the other two, resulting in a shift in meaning at all stages of production and interpretation.  

Keywords: Dialectical Ecolinguistics, visual grammar, environmental cartoons, media representation, Dawn Newspaper, Pakistan, ideological, sociological and biological implications, environmental advocacy.