الفهرس 
Statement of the ProblemOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Multimodal communication has recently become popular. Multimodality is concerned with the way the different semiotic modes (e.g. color, gesture, gaze, etc.) are combined with a sociocultural domain to create a semiotic product or event (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001). A visual mode can be found in multimodal texts such as magazines, newspapers, advertisements, textbooks, cartoons, etc. Cartoons, as multimodal texts, are found in newspapers, social networks, and magazines. Data for the study comprise eighteen purposively selected online Coronavirus cartoons (9 Egyptian cartoons and 9 American ones). The present study aims to analyze the modes that contribute to the meaning making in the selected Egyptian and American cartoons. The researcher adopts Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) theory of social semiotics with its three metafunctions to analyze the data under study on the visual level. Moreover, using insights from relevance theory, the current study aims to analyze the explicature, implicated premises and implicated conclusions of the data under investigation on both the verbal and non-verbal levels. The study concludes that the visual modes used in the Egyptian and American cartoons about the coronavirus enable the cartoon viewers to visualize the epidemiological status and increase public awareness as regards the COVID-19 pandemic. Another finding is that the cognitive context plays a vital role in the process of inferring the implicature of the Coronavirus cartoons.
Key words: Multimodality, Egyptian Cartoons, American Cartoons, Relevance Theory, and Visual Social Semiotics.