Universal and Culturally Specific Features and Linguistic Peculiarities of the Political Cartoon in the Arabic and French Languages

The article discusses the universal and culturally-specific features and linguistic means of the political cartoon in the Arabic and French languages. Political cartoon is a universal tool for political dialogue between government and society, a reflection or reaction of society to a certain political event, series of events, or a person of national or world level. The goals and objectives of political cartoon, its mechanism of influence on the addressee, and its genre identity have a common tradition and common components. The study of the phenomenon of a political cartoon in various linguistic cultures is an area of relevant multidisciplinary research, primarily because the author’s creative principle at the level of text and drawing interacts in the political cartoon with tradition and its genre framework, producing a capacious multilayer creolized text, the decoding of which requires from the addressee the presence of linguistic, logical and extralinguistic (primarily political and historical) presuppositions and the skills to analyze it. The object of the proposed work is a modern political cartoon in Arabic and French. The subject of the research is structural, lexical-semantic, pragmatic and cultural-specific characteristics of the creolized text of a political cartoon in the Arabic and French languages. The purpose of the work is to identify universal and culturally specific features of a cartoon on a political leader or an event at the iconic and verbal level in each of the languages under consideration. For the first time in Russian linguistics the presented study carries out a comparative analysis of the political cartoon in the Arabic and French languages and describes its universal features and cultural-specific peculiarities.