The expression of the Parliament is often associated with abstract concepts such as politics, democracy, or nationhood (Kapitány & Kapitány, 2002; Szabó & Oross, 2018) when instead of the literal meaning of the ‘building’, we refer to its figurative meanings. It has already been confirmed that political cartoons are rich in figurative devices (e.g., conceptual metaphor) (i.a. El Refaie, 2009) and they serve as a suitable corpus for the investigation of the figurative meaning of the Parliament. In the case of a conceptual metaphor, for instance, the Parliament (considered as a target domain) is understood via the source domain conceptually different from the target (e.g., COLOSSEUM). In that way, certain characteristic features of the source domain are mapped onto the target domain, and we are able to interpret politics, specifically the Parliament itself as the site of real, dangerous, life-or-death physical battles. All these figurative meanings can influence how we think about politics, its processes, and actors, how we argue in the case of a political problem and how we would try to solve it. The current research aims to examine how the Hungarian Parliament is visually represented in editorial cartoons and how these visual representations – through figurative conceptual devices such as conceptual metaphors and conceptual metonymies – construct the concept of the parliament. Furthermore, the thesis discusses how these cognitive devices cooperate with ironies and cultural references (such as idioms, allusions, and national symbols) which are determinant in evaluation procedures and the creation of emotional bonds between the viewer and the cartoon. In doing so, the dissertation studies the caricaturistic representations of the Parliament in three various periods (Körösényi, 2015); thus, the investigation is longitudinal (describing thirty years since 1989) and comparative. What are the novelties of the research? First, it examines Hungarian editorial cartoons in a cognitive linguistic framework, unlike ...
