Shock of values and provocation in Mafalda’s comic strips

Abstract

The present work is the result of studies upon the appraisal system by Martin and White (2005). The corpus chosen to apply such theory is composed by comic strips of Mafalda, from the Argentinian writer Quino. The selection of this genre was based on how lexically low texts and the mixture of verbal and nonverbal language contribute to instantiate the appraisal system. Thus, this work aims to identify how the evaluations are instantiated, using appraisal as theoretical support. Firstly, five comic strips published in 2012 were selected. Secondly, the comic strips were analyzed according to the lexicogrammatical resources and some idiosyncratic expressions of each character in which evaluations were identified. Then, we analyzed how such evaluations take form: whether they are inscribed (explicit) or evoked (implicit). Afterward, a semantic-discursive pattern was noted: the evaluations, either inscribed or evoked, are frequent. Such evaluations are distinct among themselves because they carry, semantically, different values and beliefs that are placed to conflict, then, causing humor. As in a domino effect, the inscribed evaluations create the provoked ones, in which the author seems to direct his reader to a final evaluation upon the phenomenon he has placed in the comic strips.