Linguistics and the Study of Comics (eBook)

Do Irish superheroes actually sound Irish? Why are Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons funny? How do political cartoonists in India, Turkey, and the US get their point across? These questions and many more are answered in this new collection on linguistics and comics, which explores language and how the verbal and the visual interact.

ELIEZER BEN-RAFAEL Professor Emeritus in Sociology at the Tel-Aviv University, Israel MIRIAM BEN-RAFAEL has taught French for many years and is an independent researcher in sociolinguistics CARLA BREIDENBACH Assistant Professor of Spanish at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, USA NEIL COHN Scholar of the cognition underlying the visual language of comics KRISTY BEERS FÄGERSTEN Assistant Professor of English Linguistics at Södertörns högskola, Sweden JILL HALLETT Graduate student in linguistics at the University of Illinois, USA RICHARD W. HALLETT Coordinator of the Linguistics Program at Northeastern Illinois University, USA GERT MEESTERS Professor of Linguisticsat the University of Liege, Belgium ELISABETH POTSCH currently works as a library specialist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA THECLA SCHIPHORST Media Artist/Designer and Faculty Member in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada RICHARD WATSON TODD Associate Professor and Head of the Centre for Research and Services in the School of Liberal Arts at King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi, Thailand VERONIKA TZANKOVA PhD student at the Communication & Culture program at York University in Toronto, Canada. SHANE WALSHE Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Zurich, Switzerland ROBERT F. WILLIAMS Associate Professor of Education at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, USA

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Do Irish superheroes actually sound Irish? Why are Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons funny? How do political cartoonists in India, Turkey, and the US get their point across? What is the impact of English on comics written in other languages?These questions and many more are answered in this volume, which brings together the two fields of comics research and linguistics to produce groundbreaking scholarship. With an international cast of contributors, the book offers novel insights into the role of language in comics, graphic novels, and single-panel cartoons, analyzing the intersections between the visual and the verbal. Contributions examine the relationship between cognitive linguistics and visual elements as well as interrogate the controversial claim about the status of comics as a language. The book argues that comics tell us a great deal about the sociocultural realities of language, exploring what code switching, language contact, dialect, and linguistic variation can tell us about identity - from the imagined and stereotyped to the political and real.