THE MANIPULATIVE POTENTIAL OF GERMAN POLITICAL CARICATURE

This article is devoted to verbal and non-verbal means of manipulating a mass addressee in order to form certain political views through caricature as a comic polycode text. The relevance of this study is due to the communicative and pragmatic potential of semiotically complicated texts functioning in modern mass media and capable of having a complex effect on the addressee. 148 cartoons published in German-language social networks, magazines, on the personal pages of famous German cartoonists, as well as on the website «Deutscher Karikaturenpreis» for 2011-2023 were the material for the study of methods of manipulative influence on the mass addressee. The specifics of the research determined the use of such methods as: the continuous sampling method for selecting polycode texts of modern political cartoons, the method of component analysis and comparative method, the method of contextual-interpretative and semantic analysis of heterogeneous components of caricature. The influencing potential of the cartoons analyzed in the article is determined, firstly, by their polycode, i.e., the transmission of information through the simultaneous use of different channels and, as a result, a stronger impact on the addressee, secondly, by the dissemination of cartoons through media discourse, contributing to an instant reaction to ongoing political events and their fixation, on the one hand, and the formation of public opinion, on the other hand. As the analysis shows, in political caricature, the non-verbal component has a greater informative value and, as a result, carries a greater pragmatic burden. Precedent phenomena play an important role in decoding and correctly interpreting the meanings inherent in the caricature: both universal, which are part of the universal cognitive space of most people, and socio-cultural, which are easily decoded only by representatives of a certain society. Political caricature is characterized by the use of such precedent phenomena as precedent situations and precedent statements, a reference to which can be expressed through precedent names. The nonverbal components of political caricature can also include coloratives and evaluative stereotypes that are actualized in the mind of the addressee.