Abstract:
This paper investigates the discourse of some social and political cartoons in the Egyptian newspapers which reveal environmental issues. To be more specific, it falls in the domain of Ecocritical Discourse Analysis (ECDA), in the sense that it proposes a model to analyze Egyptian cartoons discourse showing the linguistic, semiotic and visual tools to achieve the message or the target of these cartoons. On the one hand, the model is based on Halliday`s 1990 “New Ways of Meaning”, on the other hand, the analysis applies the Semantic Script Theory of Humor (SSTH) and Visual Metaphor (VM). The article zooms in on some ecological cartoons examining, their semiolinguistic features. This paper is supposed to be a kind of contextualism i.e syntactical and semantical questions are embedded in the context , and the situation is conceptualized as a dialogue in a speech community. Because cartoons discourse is most often critical, a (CDA) perspective is an ideal way of handling it. Rationale, aims, data and methodology for this paper are given below, followed by a relevant literature review, with a focus on ecolinguistics , ecocritical discourse , cartoons discourse as the genre of discourse for this paper .