Political cartoon as a genre of political discourse

The article is devoted to the consideration of the modern political cartoons on foreign policy and socially-significant topics in Arabic and French. Political cartoon is a genre of political discourse that entered the scope of linguistic problems in the middle of the 20th century and is an actual problem of modern linguistics. Political discourse has such characteristics as anthropocentrism, multidisciplinarity, expansionism, functionalism and explanatoriness. The genres of political discourse can be characterized as a homogeneous and creolized text; political cartoon is a creolized text that unites iconic and verbal levels and has paralinguistic characteristics. The object of the carried out analysis is the creolized text of the modern Arabic-language and French-speaking political cartoon. The subject of the study in this work was the structural, cultural-specific and linguistic characteristics of the political cartoon text in Arabic and French. The material of the study was selected to be more than 100 cartoons on political topics in Arabic and French. An appeal to the genre presentation of political discourse and comparative analysis of political cartoons is a topical issue of linguistics in the absence of a sufficient number of scientific works touching on this topic. It should be noted that the well-known works devoted to political cartoons use material which is contemporaneous with the author of the study. The study of political cartoon phenomenon in various linguistic cultures is a sphere of the actual multidisciplinary research as the author’s creative beginning at the level of the text and drawing interacts in the political cartoon with the tradition and its genre frames, producing a volume-rich multi-layered creolized text, decoding of which requires the addressee to have the language, logical and extra-linguistic presuppositions and skills of analyzing the political cartoon.