(RE)CATEGORIZATION OF AFFECT IN PANDEMIC TIMES: INVESTIGATING MULTIMODAL TEXTS

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic and social isolation imposed resignifications in the way of expressing affection. What attributes of a perceived reality have become most salient in the restructuring of the AFFECT category? This article investigates the issue in multimodal productions (Forceville, 2008) in a predominantly qualitative-interpretative way, although it resorts to quantification to mine the data (Creswell, 2007).  To this end, he configured a corpus of 263 cartoons published between March 2020 and March 2022 by the newspaper Folha de São Paulo [online] in which he identified 16 that flee from ironic or humorous allusions to the positions of the Bolsonaro government and trigger the dominance of AFFECTION. As an example, the article presents four of the 16 cartoons and analyzes them in the light of Kress and Van Leewen's Visual Grammar (2006), the concept of multimodal metaphor (Forceville, 2008) and concepts from Cognitive Linguistics (Lakoff, 1987; Langacker, 2008) in a social-cognitive-discursive approach (Musolff, 2020; S). Unlike the other cartoons published in the same period, the selected ones assume a communicative purpose aimed at moral agency (Johnson; Lakoff, 1999) and inspires new contours to AFFECTION. In the cartoons, physical contact becomes mediated by objects; Vaccination and the use of masks are now seen as a moral agency. Such (re)categorization is anchored in the interactional and socio-cognitive contexts of the pandemic period.