Do political cartoons and illustrations have their own specialized forms for warnings, threats, and the like? Speech acts in the nonverbal mode

Illocutionary force indicating devices are something of a neglected topic in visual/multimodal intercultural pragmatics, although a number of scholars have observed that some non-verbal speech-act markers have the characteristic that by employing them in a certain way one can actually accomplish the speech act itself. These not only provide a “catalog” of salient types of visual interactions recognized in a given culture, but also represent the best way into a systematic examination of all the divergent types of performative image. Backed by naturally occurring multimodal data (political cartoons and op-ed illustrations), this article considers the problem of identifying and cataloguing pictorial acts, given some problematic features, such as their implicit character and non-one-to-one mapping onto images. I also address the question of whether pictorial act markers are universal or culturally specific. Finally, it is argued that the appropriateness conditions of (verbo) pictorial illocutionary acts (and of discourse generally) depend on the cognitive context models of the participants (picture makers/viewers). All in all, this research should benefit not only multimodal and intercultural pragmatics, which is still in its infancy, but also work in the speech-act domain, which has been largely off the linguistics agenda since the 1970s and 1980s.