Pragmatic and Socio-Cognitive Reading of Selected Ugo Jesse’s Politically-Motivated Online Cartoons in Nigeria.

Abstract

Recently, cartoons on digital platforms have been one of the invaluable means of expressing diverse opinions on social-political events. Owing to this, the visual presentation and messages from cartoons have been approached from linguistic, multimodal and pragmatic perspectives. Most of these studies have concentrated on cartoons published in the print media, while some have focused on cartoons from the websites of some mainstream news publishing outfits. Scant attention has been given to Ugo Jesse, one of Nigeria’s notable digital cartoonists, who addresses Nigeria’s various social interactions and experiences via his Instagram page. Therefore, this paper describes the pragmatic features and identifies their socio-cognitive import towards the foregrounding of the dominant themes inherent in the images. With the application of some linguistic tools, twenty purposively selected cartoons from Ugo Jesse’s Instagram page were selected and analysed using Mey’s pragmatic act and van Djik’s socio-cognitive theory. Various generalisable pragmatic features were found. However, the shared situation knowledge may be easily understood only by the Nigerian audience and/or others who are unaware of the implications of these images and dialogues. These cartoons are invaluable examples of how digital platforms can help document a society’s present for the future, from which the citizens of that society may be able to infer. Social media cartoons are a potential avenue for information digitalisation capable of aiding readers’ proper interpretation of the underlying meanings of similar information on social platforms.