ABSTRACT
Speech act theory has received extensive attention in linguistics, let alone the large and technical scholarship within philosophy. This chapter considers whether speech act theory can be usefully extended to multimodal mass communication, involving combinations of texts and images and other modalities. With specific reference to the use of speech acts in Arab political cartoons on the COVID-19 pandemic, the chapter suggests ways in which speech act theory can be given a stronger sociopolitical, as well as cognitive-multimodal, dimension. It thus also argues for the benefits of combining analyses of multimodal corpora with insights from sociopragmatics. Political cartoons are not just used to depict things, namely, describe a topical event, but rather actively to do things. This also means that the business of a political cartoon cannot be reduced to criticisms. In these pandemic times, there are political cartoons expressing commands or thanks or wishes, besides criticisms. Given the richness of metaphor in political cartoons, the relationship between metaphor and speech acts is also touched on.
